Global Trans Medicine: How Knowledge and Culture Shape Gender-Affirming Healthcare (forthcoming June 2027, NYU Press)

Beginning in 2015, the emergence of gender-affirming healthcare as a new approach in transgender medicine seemed to mark a key turning point in the field. Across the globe, clinicians, patients, advocates, and activists articulated visions for care that emphasized shared decision-making and responsiveness to individualized experiences of gender. Yet the promise of gender-affirming healthcare failed to materialize for many trans and gender diverse people.

Global Trans Medicine combines rich qualitative data from over 80 interviews, observations at transgender health conferences, and content analysis to show how inequalities in knowledge processes inhibit the shift towards gender-affirming healthcare. Adopting a transnational approach that encompasses Thailand and the U.S., I argue that two knowledge hierarchies—one between Global North and Global South knowledge and the other between professional and lay expertise—converge to sustain dominant ways of knowing related to gender nonconformity and medicine. The postcolonial critique presented in Global Trans Medicine illustrates how the intersection of Global North and professional perspectives in the production, movement, and interpretation of medical knowledge works against the aims of gender-affirming healthcare not just in Thailand, but also the U.S. Examining diverse areas of care such as readiness assessments, hormone therapy, and surgeries, the book deconstructs seemingly self-evident ideas about gender, credibility, evidence, expertise, and risk contained within tools like clinical practice guidelines.

Research Support:

National Science Foundation (NSF), Graduate Research Fellowship (2018-2022)

Sexualities Project at Northwestern, Dissertation Fellowship (2021-2022)

Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University), Dispute Resolution Research Center Grant (2020)

The Graduate School (Northwestern University), Graduate Research Grant (2020)

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Past Research

Clinician Advocacy

As part of my broader research on gender-affirming healthcare, I have analyzed how U.S. clinicians make sense of advocacy as a professional responsibility. My publication in Social Science & Medicine (2023) upends the conventional understanding that ambiguity around what exactly constitutes advocacy is detrimental and instead argues that this ambiguity is productive in a multidisciplinary field such as transgender medicine. Drawing on science and technology studies scholarship about “buzzwords,” I contend that advocacy has become seen as a professional responsibility in three problem domains where clinicians reassert their expertise: health insurance, the marginalization of trans and gender diverse people, and the legality of gender-affirming healthcare.

Research Support:

National Science Foundation (NSF), Graduate Research Fellowship (2018-2022)

Kathoey Identity and Double Consciousness 

This research examined how the Du Boisian concept of double consciousness can help explain key processes of self-formation for kathoey in Thailand (gender nonconforming individuals with a feminine gender presentation). The research is based on the argument that the marginalization of Du Bois within the sociological canon has negatively impacted the field’s ability to theorize self-formation in relation to other systems of oppression, such as cisnormativity, and self-formation beyond the Atlantic World. My publication in Social Problems (2021) develops a theory of “paired double consciousness,” which argues that cisnormative and neocolonial oppression lead kathoey to experience two veils. The first veil divides self-formation between kathoey and dominant cisgender worlds within Thai society to produce “gender double consciousness.” The second veil divides self-formation between kathoey and dominant transgender worlds within a global community, which creates “transnational double consciousness.”

Research Support:

Buffett Institute for Global Studies; Graduate Student Dissertation Research Travel Award (2017)

Sexualities Project at Northwestern; Summer Research Grant (2017)