Transgender Health Care reading group
April 14, May 12, June 16 2025 (15:30-17:30)
Utrecht University
Three reading group sessions dedicated to critically discussing transgender health care, grounded in frameworks of transgender liberation and disability justice.
Trans politics have become a lightning rod for contemporary culture wars and a primary target of right-wing nationalist politics. Anti-trans legislation in the US, bans on puberty blockers in the UK, anti-gender movements across the world – as politician Carla Antonelli recently exclaimed in a fiery speech in the Spanish parliament: “Trans people – we are everyone’s topic of conversation. Everyone has to have an opinion about us. If we are trans, what we are, what we are not.”
At the heart of these debates, is access to health care. Health care can be both a site of capture and control, but also a site of radical politics. How can we envisage alternative infrastructures of health care? And how does the struggle for health care offer us a prism into broader demands for justice?
These reading group sessions focus on critically analyzing how trans health care functions today, both globally and locally. The sessions are also a space to explore how the various crises in trans health are related to structural issues, such as the neoliberalization of health care, racism and anti-immigration politics, and feminist struggles for reproductive justice.
Organized by Lieks Hettinga. Email l.hettinga@uu.nl for texts and location. The sessions are in person (for now). No university affiliation needed, everyone is welcome. Texts for session 2 and 3 will be decided on collectively.
Readings for Session 1, April 14, 2025:
- “Medical institutions, collective care” in Trans Femme Futures. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift (2024)
- “Toward a trans of color critique of medicine” in Histories of the Transgender Child. Jules Gill-Peterson (2018)
