Found on https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/concern/theses/d217qx277
In recent years, greater attention has been granted to Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual identities in healthcare and health communication scholarship; however, earnest institutional understandings of trans individuals are still in their infancy within health communication. Situated in a rapidly changing (and often devolving) medical-political landscape, this work seeks to resituate understandings of transgender subjectivity within health communication. More specifically, this paper argues that the health communication discipline’s current understanding of trans subjectivities largely serves to (re)pathologize trans subjects as patients in need of a cure, producing scholarship that is accurate but superficial at best and actively harmful to trans bodies at worst. To this end, this paper seeks to cultivate a rift in how the health academy talks about trans people, charting a new epistemic foundation that escapes the decades of linguistic cruft that dominates the medical community’s discussions of trans bodies. As such, I seek to complicate common understandings of trans as it pertains to medicine and situate this project within a paradigm of trans health communication.I develop this paradigm by examining how queer depictions of gender fail to accurately account for and contain trans within solely a queer studies paradigm. I propose to instead employ a trans studies-based paradigm for examining health communication’s depiction of trans subjectivities based on a grounded theory analysis of selected articles in and around scholarly trans studies outlets. Using this lens, I evaluate and critique the current corpus of health communication research on trans people. I likewise cultivate the theoretical groundwork that animates trans health communication and map the complex geographies between it and more traditional approaches to health communication. Finally, I outline the activist and academic potential for this new paradigm by proposing a framework for applying these findings to the health communication discipline.
