The one-day workshop brought together leading scholars in the field of sex classification history, trans medicine and transgender history: Jules Gill-Peterson, Beans Velocci, Eric Plemons and Jacob Moses and our very own Ketil Slagstad.
Medicine and medical understandings have played prominent and problematic features in framing transgender historiography. Often, the critical role of trans people in shaping and contesting medical knowledge and practices has been overlooked. In this workshop, we proposed to turn the question around and ask what transgender history says about the history of medicine. How can we use transgender history and trans medicine as a lens to analyze broader developments in medicine? What does trans medicine tell us about knowledge production, medical technologies, and clinical practices in modern medicine? This workshop sought to illuminate the history of trans/medicine as a broad analytical field with a variety of actors (activists, patients, media, institutions, experts), technologies (paper, pamphlets, membership magazines, newspaper articles, diagnostic tools, hormones, scalpels), and practices (community meetings, parties, rallies, blood tests, clinical examinations, construction of nosologies). The workshop approached history as a meaningful way of responding to pressing issues for trans people and trans medicine in the present.
It felt particularly important that the workshop, the first of its kind dedicated to the history of trans medicine (?), took place at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, which has played such an important, albeit problematic role in trans history.
More information on the event - see Trans/Medicine Workshop event page (hopkinsmedicalhumanities.org)