Enacting Transgender: An Ethnography of Transgender Ontology in a Pediatric Gender Clinic
Date
2018-04
Author
Advisors
Wilson, Ara
Rosenberg, Gabriel
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Abstract
Allopathic medicine has made recent advances in providing medical assistance for transitions
in transgender and gender non-conforming youth. This same population has increased
rates of attempted suicide in comparison to the cis-gender population. Through ethnographic
observations of clinical visits and interviews with patients and care-providers, this
thesis examines the ontology of gender and transgenderism in trans-children and adolescents
in a pediatric gender clinic. This study argues that realities of gender are enacted
through practice and that transgender ontologies come into being in the conflict of
gender enactments—often through temporal ruptures. These relational enactments of
gender and transgender are positioned temporally to engender a normative sequence
of transition within the gender clinic. Using an ethnographic lens, this thesis further
reveals a morbid irony in which the gender clinic only serves patients who have supportive
parents, thus failing to reach trans- youth experiencing intimate transphobia and
violence. Finally, this study explores how, in the face of trans- death, the queer
temporalities of transition allow the patients of the gender clinic to create and
catch glimpses of extraordinary futures. The study contributes to scholarship in medical
anthropology, trans- studies, science and technology studies, queer theory, and gender
and feminist studies.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
Cultural AnthropologyPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/16613Citation
Gottlieb, Jeremy (2018). Enacting Transgender: An Ethnography of Transgender Ontology in a Pediatric Gender
Clinic. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/16613.Collections
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