Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine

by Christoph Hanssmann

Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape

  Over the past two decades, medical and therapeutic approaches to transgender patients have changed radically, from treating a supposed pathology to offering gender-affirming care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and Buenos Aires, Care without Pathology moves across the Americas to show how trans- health activists have taken on the project of depathologization.   In New York, Christoph Hanssmann examines activist attempts to overturn bans on using public health dollars to fund trans- health care. In Argentina, he traces how trans- activists marshaled medical statistics and personal biographies to reveal state violence directed against trans- people and travestis. Hanssmann also demonstrates the importance of understanding transphobia in the broader context of gendered racism, ableism, and antipoverty, arguing for the rise of a thoroughly coalition-based mass mobilization.   Care without Pathology highlights the distributive arguments activists made to access state funding for health care, combating state arguments that funding trans- health care is too specialized, too expensive, and too controversial. Hanssmann situates trans- health as a crucible within which sweeping changes are taking place—with potentially far-reaching effects on the economic and racial barriers to accessing care.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Published November 21, 2023

Reviews

[alexander shay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an absolute slog, and I honestly don't think it needed to be. It's not a textbook, the paperback copy is the size of any other 'regular' book. And it's not as long as it looks because 1/3 of the book is dedicated to notes, citations, and index. But it really felt to me like it was something that should have been an essay or report but was instead dragged out into a book length project. It is not for lay people with its more niche field language, but Hanssmann's writing style is both repetitive/circular and vague. Over the course of several paragraphs in a row I felt like I was reading the same couple sentences over and over, and despite each sentence being very clear what was being referred to (ex. 'activists, advocates, and some practitioners' always used instead of 'they' in any instance where it might be confusing who 'they' is talking about), it basically just made the writing dense with words and jargon and convoluted in content/meaning.

I think the purpose behind the book was good, and the overarching themes of each chapter were fine. But if the whole book had been written in more straight forward prose like the conclusion chapter was, it would have been easier to understand things on a deeper than surface level. That said, I also think huge chunks of the book could have been removed just in addressing the sheer repetition of sentences and themes and the point of the book itself still would have remained, and perhaps been clearer during active reading.

[Cam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This meticulously researched and beautifully written volume is a very important work, and its voice is extremely relevant in today’s climate.