Embodiment and Erasure: Understanding Health Inequity for Queer and Trans Communities through a Queer Ecosocial Lens

Too often, researchers focus on individual behavior to explain health disparities characterizing queer and trans communities. This article uses ecosocial and queer theories to highlight the mechanisms and causal pathways contributing to poor health outcomes, focusing on the concepts of embodiment, whereby individuals physiologically and psychologically incorporate their environment, and erasure, whereby healthcare professionals, computer information systems, and national surveys render them invisible. Authors enumerate the specific pathways in the categories of cisnormativity and heteronormativity, institutional discrimination and structural violence, interpersonal violence and rejection, and internalized oppression, giving special attention to the ways in which the healthcare system contributes to health inequity for queer and trans people. The article concludes with a description of the implications of this approach to understanding queer and trans health inequity for those in the fields of social work and public health, including educators, researchers, funders, and clinicians, and calling for radically reimagining how we understand ourselves in relation to one another.