Os’s blog

New resources on Gender Identity Clinics

2026-06-12T15:49:50-04:00

My book manuscript is going along, having received good reviews from the (lovely) reviewers, but in the meantime I have a couple of new things to announce for those interested in the history of trans medicine!

First, some publishing; a new piece of mine, covering Boston Gender Identity Services and titled “Clinics and Collectives”, is out in The Baffler. Extremely fun to write, thanks to a wonderful editor, and hopefully an enjoyable read, too.

Second, for those interested in doing their own work: some new archival collections! Many years ago (okay, about…three), I was doing my thing and reaching out to all and sundry who had any connection to the early clinics, and was lucky enough to reach out to the Pearson family - the kids of M. Joseph Pearson, the founding psych at the University of Michigan clinic. I asked if he’d left anything behind, and lo and behold, he had: research memos, correspondence, entire patient files, even. And after a bit of chatting back and forth, they donated it to the UMich archives for researchers!

That collection is now processed and available, as is the Os Keyes Collection (I didn’t name it), which features the oral histories I did with surviving clinic staff. Enjoy.

Stuff I’ve been reading (May 2026)

2026-06-01T15:49:50-04:00

A lot of miscellany for multiple different projects. Can you see a theme?

Books and dissertations

Ahmed, Aziza. Risk and resistance: How feminists transformed the law and science of AIDS. Cambridge University Press, 2025. (weird book; not sure how I feel about it)

Papers and Chapters

Carlile, Paul R. “A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product development.” Organization science 13, no. 4 (2002): 442-455.
Chambers, Simone. “Illusive methodology: what is normative political theory?.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 29.3 (2026): 437-451.
Fujimura, Joan H. “Crafting science: Standardized packages, boundary objects, and “translation.”.” Science as practice and culture 168.1992 (1992): 168-69.
Hawkins, Beverley, Annie Pye, and Fernando Correia. “Boundary objects, power, and learning: The matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations.” Management Learning 48, no. 3 (2017): 292-310.
Hedley, Jane. “Surviving to speak new language: Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich.” Hypatia 7.2 (1992): 40-62.
Min, Anselm K. “From difference to the solidarity of others: Sublating postmodernism.” Philosophy & social criticism 31.7 (2005): 823-849.
Sevinç, Tuğba. “Three approaches to social unity and solidarity.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 25.4 (2022): 459-479.
Shapiro, Ian. “Problems, methods, and theories in the study of politics, or what’s wrong with political science and what to do about it.” Political theory 30.4 (2002): 596-619.
Star, Susan Leigh. “Scientific work and uncertainty.” Social studies of Science 15.3 (1985): 391-427.
Sullivan, Helen. “Objects, Agency, and Collaboration.” In Collaboration and Public Policy: Agency in the Pursuit of Public Purpose, pp. 187-213. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.
Unruh, David R. “The nature of social worlds.” Pacific sociological review 23, no. 3 (1980): 271-296.

Fiction and fun

Neal Asher, “Dark Agent” (how do the politics expressed in his acknowledgements keep getting worse? It’s like dealing with my dad [perjorative])
Jim Butcher, “Out Law” (a novella but it’s printed so it counts, shut up)
Jack Campbell, “Rendezvous with Corsair” (short story collection)
Sebastien de Castell, “Our Lady of Blades”
The new Dungeon Crawler Carl book.

More than our tools

2026-05-20T15:49:50-04:00

I have given, for some unholy reason, something like ten different talks this year. Almost all of them have been to undergrad or graduate audiences in computing or surrounding disciplines - all of whom are dealing with the tremendous weight of the world, the horrors it contains, and the helplessness those horrors provoke. And since they are computing students, they are additionally having to grapple with the specific and particular culpability of their chosen industry and profession. What all of this means is that I inevitably get a question that’s something along the lines of:

What the fuck, as technologists, do we do right now?

There are a lot of answers to that question, which I provide, because, well, they’r perfectly good answers; you can try to be thoughtful about where you work, what you work on, and how, if you’re able to do so. You can work to smuggle the resources available to you in tech out to other spaces (Corinne and I wrote a whole book chapter about this). All of this is good and necessary and only partly sufficient, because approaching this moment “as technologists” is a trap.

It’s an attractive trap, to be sure. And it’s an understandable one. School and employment and society writ large encourage us to think of being technologists as the most important aspect of our identity, and our skillset - as part of encouraging us to think of technologists more broadly as the most important part of society (I once had a boss who opened the company wide all-hands meeting with “programmers are wizards” and it got worse from there). If you’re in a U.S. university to study computer science or UX design or anything in that range, you’ve made a commitment of tens of thousands of dollars to the idea and image of yourself “as a technologist”. So it stands to reason that’s a big part of the lens through which you would view the world, and select your responses to, well, Events.

And so when confronted with Events, and Horrors - particularly those enabled by the technology industry - it is entirely understandable that many of us ask, to be facile, for a second, whether there could be an app for (fixing) that. And if the answer is no - if our expertise as computer scientists, or data scientists, or designers, doesn’t obviously map on to solutions to the problem - we…freeze. Or, having framed ourselves as technologists first and foremost, guiltily declare the issue to be a matter of someone else’s expertise, and go in search of problems that fit ours. It’s part of why you have little unionisation within technology; organising is a matter of social expertise. It’s also part of why you have people trying to fix police brutality, or government transparency, with apps and websites; it’s what we know how to do.

But: we are not simply technologists. We are entire people, with other interests, lives, and forms of expertise. This expertise may not look like a degree: it’s often a matter of experience, or access. It’s knowing how to cook, or having a car, or access to a printer. It’s living in a particular neighbourhood, with an investment in local organising or elections. All of those are things we can contribute, right now.

Moreover, we are never just what we are right now. We are also who and what we choose to put the work into becoming. Part of the trap of thinking of ourselves as technologists, first and foremost, is not only that it stops us from taking action in other ways right now, but that it stops us from seeking to develop the ability to take other action; to flourish in other ways, that will provide more resources, more angles of contribution and attack, in the future. Doing so is…hard; I know that far, far too well. But it is also human. To expose ourselves to tasks we are not-good-at, or problems we do not have a familiar solution to. To see ourselves as more than the tools we have to hand, that we have internalised as our “thing”, and to ask what else we can do, or what else we could do, in the future.

Design that app, if an app is needed. Build that website, if a website helps. But if you find that it doesn’t - and you probably will - then cook. Clean. Drive someone somewhere. Show up to meetings. Organise your coworkers. Contribute in ways that build meaning beyond your degree, or your job. Because if people can only see themselves as their work, we’ve already lost an important part of the fight.

Stuff I’ve been reading (April 2026)

2026-05-01T15:49:50-04:00

A lot of miscellany for multiple different projects.

Books and dissertations

Lewis, Sophie. Enemy feminisms: TERFs, policewomen, and girlbosses against liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025.
Pedwell, Carolyn. Revolutionary routines: The habits of social transformation. Vol. 2. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2021.

Papers and Chapters

Ahern, Dana. “Profit and power: negotiating medical authority and an informed consumer-patient in transgender surgery” BioSocieties (2025): 1-18.
Edell, Celia. “Antitransgender Legislation as Scapegoating.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 12.1 (2026).
Enszer, Julie R., and Cheryl Clarke. “Sometimes we create archives, sometimes we create dialogues: reflections on generational transfer from Sinister Wisdom.” Feminist Theory 26.3 (2025): 604-613.
Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch. “Disability beyond stigma: Social interaction, discrimination, and activism.” Journal of social issues 44.1 (1988): 3-21.
Hill, Kim Quaile, and Soren Jordan. “Does “Precocious Research Creativity” Account for Notable Late-Career Research Achievements by Political Scientists?.” PS: Political Science & Politics (2026): 1-8.
McKenna, Robin, “Doing Your Own (Activist) Research” (draft)
O’Donovan, Cian, et al. “What are AI researchers worried about?.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.06223 (2026).

Fiction and fun

Kevin Hearne’s “Iron Druid” series (re-read)
James S.A. Corey’s “The Faith of Beasts”
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Strife”

Stuff I’ve been reading (March 2026)

2026-04-01T15:49:50-04:00

A lot of miscellany for multiple different projects, this month; creativity and curiosity and AI.

Books and dissertations

None this month! Just many, many articles

Papers and Chapters

Blue, Gwendolyn, and Mél Hogan. “Getting democracy wrong: How lessons from biotechnology can illuminate limits of the Asilomar AI principles.” Journal of Digital Social Research 6.4 (2024): 107-117.
Bourne, Clea. “AI hype, promotional culture, and affective capitalism.” AI and Ethics 4.3 (2024): 757-769.
Bourne, Clea. “AI cheerleaders: Public relations, neoliberalism and artificial intelligence.” Public Relations Inquiry 8.2 (2019): 109-125.
Dodds, Tomás, et al. “AI Hype in Journalism: Visibility, Power, and the Politics of Media Narratives.” Digital Journalism 14.2 (2026): 207-219.
Dubrule, Amanda. “Gender and habit: John Dewey and Iris Marion Young on embodiment and transformation.” the pluralist 17.1 (2022): 45-51.
Elish, Madeleine Clare, and Danah Boyd. “Situating methods in the magic of Big Data and AI.” Communication monographs 85.1 (2018): 57-80.
Finlayson, Alan. “Political science, political ideas and rhetoric.” Economy and society 33.4 (2004): 528-549.
Hintz, Lisel. “Academic solidarity in the wake of disaster: Blueprint for an online writing support group.” PS: Political Science & Politics 57.3 (2024): 370-377.
Jamal, Bianca, et al. “The Unbearable Opportunity Costs of the Political Science PhD: Evidence and Lessons from Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 57.4 (2024): 939-954.
Kotliar, Dan M. “Can’t stop the hype: scrutinizing AI’s realities.” Information, Communication & Society 29.3 (2026): 828-849.
Markelius, Alva, et al. “The mechanisms of AI hype and its planetary and social costs.” AI and Ethics 4.3 (2024): 727-742.
Michelson, Melissa R., and Betina Cutaia Wilkinson. “Best Practices in Diversifying Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 56.2 (2023): 295-298.
Pedwell, Carolyn. “Transforming habit: Revolution, routine and social change.” Cultural studies 31.1 (2017): 93-120.
Pihlak, Aino, and Emily Cousens. “Putting the femme in feminist: trans feminism and the ‘male lesbian’in the American second Wave.” Gender & History (2025).
Powell, Alison, and Fenwick McKelvey. “AI policymaking as drama: Stages, roles, and ghosts in AI governance in the United Kingdom and Canada.” Journal of Digital Social Research 6.4 (2024): 77-91.
Powers, Devon. “Notes on hype.” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 17-17.
Sinclair-Chapman, Valeria, and David C. Barker. “Broadening Perspectives in Studies of American Governance.” Congress & the Presidency. Vol. 50. No. 2. Routledge, 2023.
Spade, Dean. “Laws as tactics.” Colum. J. Gender & L. 21 (2011): 40.
Sullivan, Shannon. “Reconfiguring gender with John Dewey: Habit, bodies, and cultural change.” Hypatia 15.1 (2000): 23-42.

Fiction and fun

Edward Ashton’s “The Fourth Consort” and “After the Fall”
The entire Vorkosigan saga (re-read)
Butcher’s entire “Dresden Files” (re-read)
Lynch’s “Gentlemen Bastards” series (re-read)

Things I’ve been up to

2026-03-16T15:49:50-04:00

Despite the misery of the current moment (in general, and for me in particular), it has actually been a productive six months, with a bunch of talks and a couple of publications, to boot.

On talks, I just got back from speaking at the “Beyond Borders, Beyond Binaries” conference at Kalamazoo College, where I was presenting on a pioneering gender program in Boston in the 1970s (more on that soon, because I now have a contract from The Baffler to write about it!). And in a couple of months I’ll be the discussant at UC Berkeley’s Hitchcock Lecture with Jules Gill-Peterson, for what promises to be a spirited Q&A.

And on papers, I have two small things out; the first, in collaboration with Abie Flaxman, looks at what applying Salome Vijoen’s fantastic idea of relational governance to data would look like. The second, a followup to the classic(?) “A Mulching Proposal”, applies the same satirical logic to the nonsense that is “pluralistic alignment”. They made me tone it down, alas.

Both (like I said) are small; there’s a ton of other stuff under review or in-process on political creativity, AI and biosecurity, the history of various gender identity clinics, LLMs - I do a lot of stuff. But it’s all “in process” and so not worth reporting out on yet!

Stuff I’ve been reading (February 2026)

2026-03-01T14:49:50-05:00

A lot of miscellany for multiple different projects, this month; creativity and policy and..

Books and dissertations

Felt, Ulrike. Academic times: Contesting the chronopolitics of research. Springer Nature, 2025.
Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Polity Press, 2011.
Munck, Gerardo L., and Richard Snyder. Passion, craft, and method in comparative politics. JHU Press, 2007.
Wallas, Graham. The art of thought. Solis Press, 2015.

Papers and Chapters

Amoore, Louise. “Machine learning political orders.” Review of International Studies 49.1 (2023): 20-36.
Kramer, Sarah. “Not your mouthpiece: Abortion, ideology, and compelled speech in physician-patient relationships.” U. Pa. JL & Soc. Change 21 (2018): 1.
Kropp, Cordula, Yana Boeva, and Kathrin Braun. “Socio-Digital Co-Design Practices: A Case Study on Human-Computer Entanglements in Architecture.” Science & Technology Studies (2024).
Lang, J. Aidan. “The Right to Remain Silent: Abortion and Compelled Physician Speech.” BCL Rev. 62 (2021): 2091.
Llaveria Caselles, Eric. “Trans materialist critique as feminist practice: lessons from a polemic against nonbinary identities.” Frontiers in Sociology 10 (2025): 1646508.
Orentlicher, David. “Abortion and compelled physician speech.” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 43.1 (2015): 9-21.
Portuondo, Laura. “Abortion regulation as compelled speech.” UCLA L. Rev. 67 (2020): 1.
Post, Robert. “Informed consent to abortion: a First Amendment analysis of compelled physician speech.” U. Ill. L. Rev. (2007): 939.
Rodman, Emma. “On political theory and large language models.” Political Theory 52.4 (2024): 548-580.
Vase, Susanna. “From STI Policy Objectives to Infrastructures: Understanding the Implementation of Directed Challenge-Driven Research Funding.” Science & Technology Studies (2024).
Vallée‐Tourangeau, Frédéric. “Thinking Through Making or the Art of Verification.” The Journal of Creative Behavior 60.1 (2026): e70099.
Wohn, Caleb, et al. “” Are we writing an advice column for Spock here?” Understanding Stereotypes in AI Advice for Autistic Users.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.12690 (2026).

Fiction and fun

The new Charles Stross;
Bethany Jacobs’ “This Brutal Moon”;
Elizabeth Bear’s “The Folded Sky”;
Matt Diniman’s “Operation Bounce House”, “The Dominion of Blades”, and “The Hobgoblin Riot”

Stuff I’ve been reading (January 2026)

2026-02-01T14:49:50-05:00

New year, new books!

Books and dissertations

Bettcher, Talia Mae. Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
Chang, Hasok. Realism for realistic people. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Jaeggi, Rahel. Progress and Regression. Harvard University Press, 2025.
Schulman, Sarah. The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. Penguin Group, 2025.
Zurn, Perry. How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University. Duke University Press, 2024.

Papers and Chapters

Amabile, Teresa M. “The art of (creative) thought.” The Creativity Reader 15 (2019).
Corrigan, Oonagh. “Empty ethics: the problem with informed consent.” Sociology of health & illness 25.7 (2003): 768-792.
Ebeling, Mary FE. “Patient disempowerment through the commercial access to digital health records.” Health 23.4 (2019): 385-400.
Elmholdt, Kasper Trolle, et al. “The hopes and fears of artificial intelligence: a comparative computational discourse analysis.” AI & SOCIETY (2025): 1-18.
Emke, Ivan. “Methodology and Methodolatry: Creativity and the Impoverishment of the Imagination in Sociology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie (1996): 77-90.
Fullerton, Allegra H., and Christopher M. Weible. “Examining emotional belief expressions of advocacy coalitions in Arkansas’ gender identity politics.” Policy Studies Journal 52.2 (2024): 369-389.
Hill, Kim Quaile. “Research creativity and productivity in political science: a research agenda for understanding alternative career paths and attitudes toward professional work in the profession.” PS: Political Science & Politics 53.1 (2020): 79-83.
Lamble, Sarah. “Confronting complex alliances: Situating Britain’s gender critical politics within the wider transnational anti-gender movement.” Journal of lesbian studies 28.3 (2024): 504-517.
Lampredi, Giacomo. “(An) Aesthetic Emotions: A Pragmatist View of Sensibility Change.” Sociological Theory: 07352751251396510.
Marres, Noortje, et al. “AI as super-controversy: Eliciting AI and society controversies with an extended expert community in the UK.” Big Data & Society 11.2 (2024): 20539517241255103.
Marres, Noortje, et al. “On the controversiality of AI: The controversy is not the situation.” Big Data & Society 12.4 (2025): 20539517251383870.
Marvin, Amy, and Isobel Bess. “Atmospheres of Conversion: Trans Cinema, Tactics, and t4t Sociality (Author Preprint).”
Munk, Anders Kristian, et al. “Beyond artificial intelligence controversies: What are algorithms doing in the scientific literature?.” Big Data & Society 11.3 (2024): 20539517241255107.
Neff, Gina. “Can Democracy Survive AI?.” Sociologica 18.3 (2024): 137-146.
Shelby, Renee, et al. “Sociotechnical harms of algorithmic systems: Scoping a taxonomy for harm reduction.” Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 2023.
Singh, Ranjit, and Michael Lynch. “Proverbial economies of STS.” Social Studies of Science 55.3 (2025): 327-349.
Sloane, Mona. “Controversies, contradiction, and “participation” in AI.” Big Data & Society 11.1 (2024): 20539517241235862.
Torgerson, Douglas. “Lasswell in the looking glass: a ‘mirror’for critical policy studies.” Critical Policy Studies 13.1 (2019): 122-130.
Williams, Rua Mae. “Metaeugenics and metaresistance: From manufacturing the ‘includeable body’to walking away from the broom closet.” Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights/Revue canadienne des droits des enfants 6.1 (2019): 60-77.

Call for Proposals: Ideologies in HCI

2026-01-22T14:49:50-05:00

Some colleagues and I are putting together a workshop for CHI 2026 on ideologies in HCI - with remote participation welcome! Please do submit if you have something. The full Call for Proposals:

Technology continually carries fragments of politics—design choices and values shaping outcomes. This workshop explores how broader ideologies—coherent worldviews underpinning political and technological systems—influence and connect work in HCI. We aim to foster explicit discussion of ideology’s role in shaping research agendas, values, and assumptions through a hands-on half-day workshop.

We invite up to 20 scholars at any career stage to submit a 2–3 page position paper (ACM single-column or DIS2026 pictorial format) engaging with any of the following: how they define or interpret “ideology”; examples of ideology in HCI research or practice; or political/methodological suggestions for making ideology visible. Nonverbal or pictorial contributions are welcome, as submissions will serve as materials for the workshop activities. Papers will be reviewed for relevance, originality, and potential to advance the conversation. Selection will balance diversity in background, seniority, geography, and perspective, if oversubscribed.

Selected contributions will be published on arXiv with author’s consent. One author per submission must attend, either in person at the conference or during the pre-workshop online event. For more details and submission instructions, visit: https://ideologies.digital

Purity Panics: Transphobia and Eugenics

2026-01-10T19:08:50-05:00

I was recently asked to give a talk at the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association’s annual conference, on a panel with the wonderful Liz Dietz, Bella-Rose Kelly, and Perry Zurn. The result is not enough to be publishable, and too much to let evaporate, so: it’s here.

Thank you very much for joining us. Before we get started, I do want to riff on something Liz mentioned – the government complaints about people trying to access womens’ bathrooms. There are many good reasons to dispute this fear, this complaint, this site of panic, but, I want to mention an ethical one that I think should be taken up more, and that is that – having been in mens’ bathrooms – I don’t think anyone should be expected to endure that kind of, shall we say, sensory experience.

I am going to begin my talk in perhaps the most obnoxious way possible, by paraphrasing Foucault. He once opened a talk by specifying that he was not an analytic philosopher, because nobody is perfect. My paraphrase is that I am not, by training, a philosopher at all – so I beg for your indulgence if I ignorantly tread on speaking or argument conventions.

Rather than being a philosopher, I am a…mess, intellectually. But I’m a mess whose work centers on the sociology, history and (sometimes) philosophy of trans medicine – I’ve just submitted (last week) the manuscript for my first book, Trans Science, which is a history of scientific work surrounding trans care based on around 30 archives, two of which I created, and interviews with historic practitioners, policymakers and patients involved in trans care from the 1950s to the 1980s. Specifically, over 200 interviews. I am very tired.

So, with that scene-setting, you’ll be unsurprised to know that the focus of this talk is trans medicine. Specifically, it’s about how the current moment in culture surrounding trans medicine relates to eugenics.

There are a lot of definitions of eugenics; conventionally, it might be summarised as techniques and technologies that promote and pursue a particular vision of what forms of human life are desirable/undesirable – and seek to ensure their perpetuation or elimination. I would add to that by pointing to the work of Rua Williams, who notes that, in ideology and execution, eugenics often moves “past optimized physical prowess, and even beyond psychological fitness, and into the realm of moral purity”. While eugenic practices are often interpreted as focusing on disability, they are just as frequently about gender and race – motivated by that mentioned idea of moral purity, and how it interacts with ideas of racial supremacy. Ladelle McWhorter makes an important point, I think, by emphasising that while white supremacy is often interpreted as starting from the idea that whiteness is supreme, it is instead an active process – it requires that whiteness, and white populations, be made and maintained as supreme through the purification of whiteness and the repetition of a particular idea of what is “best”. This means that eugenics is essential to a white supremacist project – it is one of the mechanisms by which whiteness is, to return to Williams, “purified”.

Eugenics and the history of trans medicine

So how does eugenics appear in trans medicine? Historically-speaking, it appears in a very strange way. One might expect that eugenicists would be opposed to gender-affirming care – that they would be opposed to trans lives altogether. But in fact, many of the early pioneers of such care were also ardent eugenicists. Through my archival work, I have uncovered strong links between those who ran, for example, early Gender Identity Clinics in the United States, and the anxiety around population control and management in the 1950s.

This did not (and does not) mean that trans people constituted an exception to eugenic thought: instead, eugenic thought strongly shaped both the rhetorics used to justify trans medicine, and the form that the provision of medical care took.

Trans medicine was justified, in part, by arguing that it made sense from a eugenicist basis. This was on two grounds. The first, most directly, was that trans people – seen as imperfect and impure – could be put to use as a disposable population, from a population management perspective. Harry Benjamin, the pioneering physician whose book The Transsexual Phenomenon influenced so much of the narratives and practices surrounding trans people and care, explicitly wrote that while the taboo surrounding gender-affirming care was often motivated by the concern that procreation was prevented in patients, it could be countered by pointing to “the only too well justified fear of overpopulation”.

Simultaneously, trans medicine constituted a “rehabilitative” practice, as John Money put it. Through gender-affirming care, trans people could be made more useful – could be made, if not normal, then to simulate normalcy in a societally productive fashion. By providing treatment, doctors could take a population and render them capable of employment, marriage, and at least the fostering or adoption or children.

None of this changed the fact that, while seeking to rehabilitate existing trans people, doctors simultaneously saw transness and the desire for medical transition as an imperfection that could (and should) be eliminated. Early clinics explicitly articulated their provision of treatment as motivated by a desire to discover the causes of trans identity, with the hopes that it could be snuffed out. And in structuring that care, the clinics simultaneously put rules and regulations in place to ensure, for example, that patients received divorce, and were separated from their children – in order to avoid “confusing” those children and risking the further spread of trans desires.

I want to emphasise that although these examples are from the 1970s and 1980s, the mentality behind them – that trans medicine is rehabilitative, that trans lives are less-than “the ideal” – still undergird a lot of medical mentalities surrounding care. That the status quo within the field is not too far divorced from where it was back then in outlook, only in the intensity with which that outlook is made explicit.

Eugenics and trans medicine in the present moment

These days, of course, political narratives around trans medicine look…well, different. As people in this room have definitely noticed, we’re in the midst of a good old-fashioned moral panic surrounding gender-affirming care. There are state-level bans, federal-level bans, and active scrutiny of and, frankly, administrative harassment, of both providers and patients. What motivates these actions and this panic is…well, a lot of things. Part of it is a pragmatic and cynical political calculation; the realisation by socially conservative forces that gay marriage no longer serves as an effective rallying cry for right-wing voters, and the need for something new.

But part of it – both rhetorically and motivationally – is a different kind of eugenic and reproductive anxiety. In the 1960s, the fear was overpopulation – a fear that was deeply racially charged. Too many of the “wrong people” (specifically and particularly, people of colour in developing nations) were having children. This fear is still present: see the popularity of the “great replacement theory” on the right – but has been expanded to include the fear that “the right people” (specifically, western, white populations) are not having enough children. We see increasing attention by both the right and neoliberal center on “demographic collapse” and on “pronatalism”; on efforts to popularise the right people reproducing (in the right way).

The fear at the heart of this effort functions not only because it plays on direct racial tropes, but also because it plays on anxieties about the collapse of the “proper” (read: heterosexual, white, middle-class) family unit, and the collapse of the gender roles that supported that same structure. As Elizabeth Corredor has convincingly argued, the current right-wing movement against “gender ideology” targets gender precisely because gender, as a concept, opens up opportunities and imaginaries beyond the inevitability of such a structure. It is part of a backlash against not only trans lives and care, but abortion rights, divorce rights, and equal access to employment or social services. All of these things have one thing in common: they are seen as destabilising that traditional, and always-racialised, ideal of a monogamous, heterosexual couple reproducing within marriage. This current moment of pushback is an attempt to re-cement that ideal, and perpetuate cultures centered around it.

Given all of that, it is no surprise to see those reproductive anxieties (and the ideals of purity and racial and cultural reproduction that backstop it) at play in many of the efforts to constrain gender-affirming care. Most prominently, I would point to the Executive Order issued by Donald Trump titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”, which seeks to prohibit gender-affirming care for adolescents.

The executive order’s rhetoric says a lot about the fears that motivate it, or that those who wrote it seek to stir in the reader. It focuses almost exclusively on adolescent transmasculine people – on people assigned female at birth – and does so through a reproductive lens. Gender-affirming care, the EO states, produces in patients “the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding”. This is not an aside: it is the very second paragraph. And that is not a coincidence: it is ultimately about the fear that gender-affirming care, or transition more generally, will reduce the population capable of that idealised form of social and biological reproduction. That it will constrain us in reaching physical, social, and moral purity – these forms of purity inherently intertwined with white supremacy.

Responding to the present moment

So what am I trying to communicate here? Other, perhaps, than that I am not a philosopher. And what on earth is the connection to disability? Why are we all here?

Well, on the first: I have a concern about the current political moment. And that is not that the people seeking to prohibit trans care and demonise trans people will win – it is that they will lose only through the restoration of the previous status quo. And in a sense, this will be a win for them, because as I have tried to demonstrate, the moral impetus underpinning many of the current restrictions is based on a value framework shared by practitioners on both sides of the aisle: that trans-lives are subnormal lives, that trans people are subnormal people, and that trans medicine should be viewed as a site to constrain the existence of those lives. While switching from practices that seek to eliminate us to practices that seek to minimise us is an improvement, it is not enough of one.

This leads us to the connection to disability, because – and I say this as someone both disabled and trans – disabled communities have a long history with everything going on here. Having to pick between paternalistic tolerance and outright elimination – and knowing that they are ultimately the same urge expressed in different forms. Disability theorists’ responses have been all over the map, but one common theme is simply refusal of this dichotomy: a refusal to accept assistance that is premised on also accepting the right of those outside disabled spaces to assess which of us are worth allowing to live, and a refusal to accept the premise of that: the premise that it is a judgment for them to make, recognition they have the power to offer or withold.

In the present moment – when trans people are asked to choose between outright elimination, and allies who are the bearers of the legacy of doctors with their own eugenicist mindsets – we should learn from disability theory. We should learn that this dichotomy is a false one, and that empowerment that conserves the enactor’s authority to determine who receives it is no empowerment at all.