“Is society ready for this pregnant husband?” was the subheading of Thomas Beatie’s 2008 essay about his pregnancy. Mr. Beatie was considered the first pregnant trans man to come forward publicly; his story was hugely influential in terms of visibility but also the subject of hurtful jokes and discrimination (Barbara Walters, for example, referred to… Read more →
Tag: Transgender
Trans Care Webs: A Review of Hil Malatino’s Trans Care
Hil Malatino’s Trans Care asks a seemingly simple question: What does care look like in trans lives? To be clear, Malatino isn’t asking how trans people are cared for. This is not a book about institutionalized forms of care or about how to make clinics, schools, social services, or public programs more trans-inclusive. Rather, this… Read more →
Honor to Us All: What Trans Men Gained and Lost in Mulan (2020)
My parents took me to see Mulan for my ninth birthday. Appropriately for someone raised as a girl, they bought me a Mulan doll that featured prominently in my playtime (as I’ve written before, I could never honestly tell my gender therapist that I hated dolls). Later, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” became… Read more →
Who Decides? Medical Intervention for Transgender and Intersex Children
Who should decide whether medical intervention on a child’s body is necessary? Ideally, the person who will undergo the treatment should have a say in these decisions. Patients themselves, even if they are children, should understand all their options and assent to whatever procedures are on the table. Technically, parents are the ones providing consent… Read more →
Roadmap to the Brave New (Transmasculine) World: An Interview with Arlene Stein
In the past two decades, the word “transgender” has found a place in our everyday lexicon, featuring in headlines, TV shows, books, movies, and conversations in a wide variety of spaces. Yet, even as Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner have become household names, trans people continue to navigate a society where a common understanding of… Read more →
Fight and Flight: “Butch Flight,” Trans Men, and the Elusive Question of Authenticity
My junior year of college, my roommate and dear friend had a butch girlfriend. She aligned more with what many would consider traditional masculinity than I did; there was always a can of Axe body spray in the back of her truck. She confessed to me one night that she felt pressure to transition to… Read more →
Imagining Sex Change in Early Modern Europe
Once a historical mind starts thinking about the ways sex intersects with the histories of medicine, it’s almost more difficult to divorce the two. Sex itself is physiological, psychological, and, historically, subject to a range of medical scrutiny. The histories of some particular realms of medicine are equally and obviously inextricable from sex – from… Read more →
Who Gets a Bathroom Pass? The History of School Bathrooms
Gavin Grimm is a 17-year-old boy, who like millions of other school children, simply wants to be able to attend to basic bodily functions while at school. Last year, Gavin stood in front of his school district’s board of education and said, “I am just a human. I am just a boy. Please consider my… Read more →
Women’s Health Care: Not Just for Women Anymore
Mammogram waiting rooms are sometimes different from other medical waiting areas. If you’re going to get an x-ray of your knee or any other body part, you stay fully clothed until you are called into a private exam room. But if you’re going for a mammogram and then a follow-up ultrasound (a separate procedure), you… Read more →
Fear-mongering from Anita Bryant to Houston’s Proposition 1
This post was originally published on February 1, 2016, during Nursing Clio’s Undergraduate Week, when we brought you amazing work written by students at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. Students wrote their essays as part a “Transgender Issues” course taught by Elizabeth Reis. A man approaches a public women’s restroom. He pushes his way inside, locking himself… Read more →