Trans Studies in Law and Medicine

4.0 credits

This course will explore the relationship between medical and legal understandings of gender. What does it mean to look beyond a simplistic binary of "man" and "woman"? We will center transgender identity to explore how law and medicine regulate lived experiences of gender and sexuality. Adopting a holistic framework that views the development of gender identity and expression as a complex dialogue between biology and culture, the course challenges the hegemonic artifice of a “natural” binary opposition between female/male and woman/man. We blur these contested categories, complicating them with sexuality, race, class, ability, history, and location. Citing current, historical and cross-cultural examples of individuals and communities who destabilize prevailing sex/gender norms, the course critiques how societies react to the presence of “other” gender identities, embodiments and expressions. We will focus on the recent increase in trans visibility and advocacy, and the ensuing challenges to legal, medical and social norms and attitudes predicated on the existence of only two kinds of gendered persons. We will center marginalized voices by reading scholarly texts written by trans people, and also watching films, listening to music, reading comics, memoirs, and magazines to theorize trans lives from the lived experience of trans people themselves. From this standpoint, we will take a critical and interdisciplinary look at trans studies across the fields of anthropology, history, interdisciplinary theory, politics, and the arts, to analyze global medical and legal discourses on gender.