The Business of Birth
This week's review examines maternity care in the U.S., unpacking the difference between "fetus-centered and woman-centered reproductive health regimes."
Posted on in Review of the Week
Trans Medicine
Happy Pride! This week's review takes a sociological approach to trans medicine, tracing the history and development of gender-affirming care.
Posted on June 6, 2022 in Review of the Week
Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
shuster, stef m. New York University, 2021
224p bibl index, 9781479845378 $89.00, 9781479899371 $27.00, 9781479842810
This text illustrates an important intersection of transgender studies and medical sociology by examining the history of medical providers treating transgender patients from the 1950s to the current day. Drawing on a combination of resources including archival data, interviews, and personal observations of medical providers encountered at conferences, while framing their discussion through a lens of transgender advocacy, Shuster (Michigan State Univ.) unpacks concepts such as evidence, expertise, and legitimacy in a medical context. Because trans medicine is a newer, interdisciplinary field, practitioners including therapists, surgeons, and endocrinologists are shown to struggle with establishing expertise and legitimacy while balancing risk and uncertainty in their treatment of patients within professional norms. For example, providers use diagnostic categories to allow for treatment but also to standardize and regulate gender identity and transitions. Transgender patients must both conform to standards of legitimacy embraced by medical practitioners and submit to control and surveillance during their treatment. Shuster treads a difficult path between academic analysis and advocacy, and therefore this work should be contextualized and valued as counterbalancing prevailing conservative medical institutional narratives. Shuster’s work will fit well for gender studies, medical history, medical anthropology and sociology, science and technology studies, transgender studies, and bioethics courses.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers.
Reviewer: S. M. Weiss, Secular, Eclectic, Academic Homeschoolers
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Studies
Subject: Science & Technology – Health Sciences
Choice Issue: Jan 2022
Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of related titles:
- Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System
- Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty
- Intersectionality in Feminist and Queer Movements: Confronting Privileges
- The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion
- Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution Rev. ed
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