anticipation

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Understanding Trans Health – available to pre-order!

Last month I finished writing my first book, Understanding Trans Health: Discourse, Power and Possibility.

This book reports on the wide-ranging research project I undertook from 2010 to 2017, looking at trans discourses and experiences of healthcare services in the UK. It will be of interest to academics, students, health practitioners and activists working and studying in the field of trans health, and will be published by Policy Press in June 2018.

Understanding Trans Health is available for pre-order it for £21.59 (paperback) or £60.00 (hardback) from the Policy Press website. E-book and Kindle versions will also be available soon. If you work or study at a university or college, it would be really great if you could encourage your library to order in a copy!

If you live in the Americas, you can buy it through University of Chicago Press.

I’ll be writing more about the book as the release date approaches. In the meantime, feast your eyes upon the stunning cover commissioned by Policy Press: an image that reflects continuing inequalities of access, the pain of waiting, and patient experiences of anticipation.

Understanding trans health

In other book news, myself and Igi Moon are still working hard on our co-edited volume, The Emergence of Trans: Essays on Politics, Culture and Everyday Life. We’ve had some really fantastic chapter submissions and I can’t wait to share more about this too in the coming months.

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WPATH 2016 poster: “A time of anticipation”

Here’s the poster I presented at this year’s WPATH Symposium:

Anticipation poster.png

You can also download a PDF version here.

The magnet is a metaphor for anticipation, which is both a product of and shapes feelings, emotions and experiences of time. This process is mediated by both trans community discourses and medical systems.

It’s very important to note that the majority of research participants had good things to say about the health professionals who helped with their transition. However, there is also a high prevelance of transphobia and cisgenderism within medical systems and clinical pathways. Anxiety and mistrust of practitioners within the trans patient population is endemic, and this is compounded by long waiting times.

My wider research looks critically at how discourses of trans health are differently understood within and between community/support spaces, activist groups and the professional sphere; however, the purpose of this particular poster was communicate some of the difficult experiences that current patients have with waiting. It sparked some productive conversations and I hope that further work will follow from this.

Sources:

Transitional Demands (Jess Bradley and Francis Myerscough)

Experiences of people from , and working with, transgender communities within the NHS – summary of findings, 2013/14 (NHS England)

Current Waiting Times & Patient Population for Gender Identity Services in the UK (UK Trans Info)