Publications
Gatekeeping ‘Authentic’ Gender: The Somatechnics of Transition Surgery and ‘Male Enhancement.’
Jennifer Hites-Thomas
2022. In J. Fellows & L. A. Smith (Eds.) Gender, Sex and Tech: An Intersectional Feminist Guide. Canadian Scholars Press.
Listen to the podcast associated with this publication here or here.
Abstract: Trans folks who want gender confirming genital surgeries often have to wait years to access these procedures while trying to 'prove' to medical gatekeepers that their gender identities are authentic. Yet cisgender men interested in 'male enhancement' procedures—such as penile length and girth augmentations—can readily access these genital technologies after one medical consultation—sometimes within the same day—without needing to prove their gender identities are stable and authentic. Building on the work of T. Garner (2017, 2014)—who analyzed trans and cis men‘s chest surgeries—I compare gender confirming genital surgery with male enhancement in order to reveal the assumptions, justifications, and prohibitions underlying these procedures. I analyze how medical discourse frames patient authenticity differently between cis men and trans people in ways that shape these patients‘ access to genital technologies. I argue that medical discourses such as authenticity render cis men's post-surgical bodies as natural while constructing post-surgical trans bodies as unnatural. These discourses work to deny appropriate health care for trans people, yet are means of access for cis men seeking to enhance normative forms of embodiment. This research is based on twenty in-depth, qualitative interviews with medical practitioners who perform male enhancement and gender confirmation procedures.
Jaye Cee Whitehead and Jennifer Thomas.
2013. Sexualities, 16(3-4): 383-400.
Abstract: Drawing from our qualitative, in-depth interviews of 35 professionals who write referral letters for ‘‘gender transition,’’ we explore how practitioners’ decisions to approve, delay or refuse access to body modifications speak to the centrality of normative concepts of sexuality and the social function of bodies in the cultural politics of gender identity. We argue that practitioners construct what we call an ethic of body modification that tends toward reducing the body to its symbolic function—as a representation of the subject’s true gender and a basis for sexual identity. We also discuss the views of a minority of practitioners who resist this tendency by creating an alternative path for body modification independent from identity claims. We conclude by discussing the cultural/political implications of pseudo-scientific discourses that assume gender identity is natural, stable and universal, whereas bodies are flexible and malleable social representations.
Jaye Cee Whitehead, Jennifer Thomas, Brad Forkner, and Dana LaMonica.
2012. Journal of Gender Studies, 21(4): 387-400.
Abstract: The following study is based on 35 in-depth, qualitative interviews with licensed marriage and family therapists, counselors, clinical social workers, and professional psychologists who advertise their services as ‘trans-friendly’, ‘trans-supportive’, or ‘trans-positive’. We focus on cases in which practitioners denied clients access to body modifications for reasons related to gender identity in an effort to distill how practitioners’ decisions are based on their working understandings of the appropriate relationship between gendered identities and sexed bodies. In the process of determining clients’ access to body modifications, practitioners speak of the importance of the level of practice, as opposed to codified texts such as the DSM, in political and ideological constructions of gender and the materialization of sexed bodies. Instead of sharing one primary configuration of these ideological components, the practitioners we interviewed differed in terms of their assumption that gender identity is a product of biological, spiritual, or social processes. We conclude by considering the possibilities for the clinical encounter to subvert dominant gender ideology by authorizing more fluid gender identities and sexed bodies.