For the Health of All: Global Transformations in Trans Knowledge

Transgender health, and the scientific and medical knowledge underpinning it, has been transformed over the past two decades. Since the 2000s, coalitions of activists, doctors, and scientists have made important if fragile gains in an effort to depathologize trans people's encounters with medicine. However, both research and activism in the field has tended to center knowledge and controversies that take place in Euro-American societies. Three new books on transgender life in different locations—in Brazil, Argentina, the United States of America, and India—reveal how alternative ways of knowing and enacting trans health are emerging on a world-wide scale. Each book's engagement with the world-wide politics of trans knowledge from situated local and national contexts aligns with historical interest in science and technology studies in what Susan Leigh Star called the “high tension zone” produced by binary sex classification. Looking to experiments in trans knowledge beyond the locations where it is usually thought to be produced provides new opportunities to consider both how and why cisgender normativity is naturalized as a biological condition with powerful political effects.