transnormativity

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Remembering Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway in 2006. Photo by Charles Rogers.

I was sad to hear last week of Lynn Conway’s passing, at the age of 86. Equally, I’m extremely glad she got to live such a long and impactful life. She was an important pioneer in the field of computer science, where her innovations contributed to the development of the microchips we use in so much of our technology. She also played a vital role in promoting women’s careers in STEM, and in providing information for trans people at the turn of the century.

During the early 2000s, Conway uploaded a substantial amount of information about trans lives and transition to her personal website. This material was hugely important to a great number of people, while also reproducing certain forms of transnormativity and stereotypical notions of “success”.

For example, while there was some diversity among the women listed on her pages of “transsexual women’s successes“, most are white, cis-passing, and occupied middle-class professions.

I came across Conway’s site around the time I was coming out to myself as a teenage trans girl. Having grown up in a void of information about trans people’s lives, her website both created a sense of possibility, and made transition seem more fantastical and distant.

Nevertheless, I’ll always remain grateful for what Conway did for trans people, as well as so many others. The resources she put online, for free, were created with love, care, and hope for the future. That’s an example I am committed to following through my own life.

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New article: Transnormativity in the psy disciplines

Today sees the publication of the first full article from the Trans Pregnancy project team, in the journal American Psychologist:

Transnormativity in the psy disciplines: Constructing pathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and Standards of Care

[click here to read in American Psychologist]

[click here to read free open access version]

In this article we provide a brief history of how certain narratives and expectations around how trans people should behave and be treated have been constructed through the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, especially in a US context.

It is part of a great new special issue on Histories of psychology after Stonewall, edited by Peter Hegarty and Alexandra Rutherford.

We examine how the interests of cisgender clinicians and transgender patients have variously been opposed and entwined, and contextualise this in relation to wider structures of racism, sexism, colonialism, and binary thinking around sex and gender. We focus especially on how guidance for diagnosing trans people and managing trans healthcare has been contested across various versions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) and the International Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA, later WPATH) Standards of Care.

This article does not focus specifically on questions of fertility, pregnancy and childbirth (although we briefly touch very on this topic). Rather, it provides important historical background on the evolution of certain medical services which have help to shape how trans people are treated and percieved. We are also currently writing a number of articles that will report on specific research findings from the Trans Pregnancy project, and I am really looking forward to sharing them also when they are published!