Towards a Trans Narrative Medicine

This article explores the lived experiences of transgender persons, with particular attention to how their gender identities are narrated and perceived in encounters with the healthcare system. Research consistently shows that transgender people experience substantially higher rates of health challenges than the general cisgender population. Drawing on gender theories developed by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Paul B. Preciado, which are rarely known within healthcare, we demonstrate how medical institutions often impose rigid expectations on the stories of transgender people that fail to capture the nature of transgender lives. Inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s mode of reparative reading, two literary works by young Danish trans authors show how transgender people in Denmark are compelled to perform a biomedical narrative of suffering to access gender-affirming care. We thus argue for a more open-minded approach in medical discourse to transgender healthcare that recognizes the variability of gender identity. One way forward may be to integrate courses such as narrative medicine—including reading literary texts about and by transgender persons—into medical education and continued learning.