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oa Transgenderzorg als zorgpraktijk - De werking van cultuur, geld en instituties in een genderidentiteitskliniek in de Verenigde Staten
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Volume 17, Issue 1, May 2014, p. 47 - 64
Abstract
Transgender health care as a care practice. Culture, money, and institutions at work in a gender identity clinic in the United States
While often approached as a field structured by stringent socio-medical ideas about gender and sex, transgender health care is, in addition, like any other medical field, also shaped by local ideologies of health and well-being, health insurance regulations, and institutional administrative processes. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a gender identity clinic in the Midwestern United States, I offer a tripartite approach to understanding the interactions among culture, money, and institutions for the constitution of transgender health care. This tripartite model shows the dilemmas clinicians and transgender people are confronted with when providing help in or seeking access to an ideologically fragile field of medicine, in which the various parties involved raise questions of what constitutes transgenderism, who should cover the costs of care, and how to use mandatory diagnostic criteria. This article demonstrates that transgender care is as much about health and care, as it is about gender and sex.