Sick of it All: Care & Depathologization Activism in Trans Health
Chris Hanssmann, University of California, Davis
Trans depathologization has often centered around the claim, “We’re trans, we’re not sick.” However, activists’ efforts to push back against psychiatric diagnoses are increasingly being identified as ableist in their work to distinguish trans wellness and sanity from “true” forms of mental pathology. Given these critiques, what’s useful now about thinking with depathologization? Rather than focusing solely on disavowals of disability, this talk examines depathologization as a more expansive set of phenomena. Drawing on ethnographic and document-based research in New York City and Buenos Aires between 2012-2018, it analyzes varying strands of trans depathologization activism, their specific objectives, and their dispersed effects. Centering the activist-advanced desire for “care without pathology”, the talk examines how activists have developed distinct orientations to depathologization depending on their understanding of what comprises pathologization in the first instance. Looking to interviews, historiography, and activist writing and art, I show how activists theorized pathologization and depathologization in different ways, leading to a range of political visions. Bringing together critiques of trans normativity, feminist science and technology studies, and analyses of care and political economy, I argue that depathologization must be recognized diffractively and in a broader historical and political landscape. In so doing, I focus on how coalition-focused activists approached depathologization with a desire not only to change medicine, but also to intervene in structures of racialized immiseration and to transform care politics.
Bio: Christoph Hanssmann is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. His first book, Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists are Changing Medicine (2023) was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He works collaboratively with researchers and activists in feminist, queer and transfeminist health and justice, and has published articles in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Feminist Formations, and Social Science and Medicine.