Primary Submission Category: Gender
Critical Approaches to Transgender Population Construction
Authors: Dylan Felt
Presenting Author: Dylan Felt*
Effective population health research requires meaningful population definition. Per Krieger, “meaningfulness” is constructed in relation to the intrinsic and extrinsic dynamics which constitute populations. As transgender (trans) population health research has grown, there has been a correspondingly increased focus on developing “best practice” measures to identify trans populations. However, work in this area is limited by the imposition of cisnormative approaches to gender and sex measurement onto trans people, who often defy binary, discrete conceptualizations of gender and sex.
This session places critical trans theorizing in conversation with public health practice to interrogate the ways in which trans population health research has been limited by cisnormative biases in population measurement. First, drawing on the field of Trans Studies, I use Stryker’s reclamation of the transsexual-as-monstrous to consider the extent to which normative measures of sex and gender can be readily applied to groups deemed “unnatural” for their refusal to conform to expectations of gender and sex. I then explore real-world examples of how this manifests in research, focusing on the causes and consequences of trans population miscategorization—for example, how assumptions about trans people’s sex organs and sex lives have led to trans men being excluded from populations of “men who have sex with men” and from clinical trials for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. I use these examples to illuminate areas of subjectivity and researcher agency in creating trans populations, and draw on Karkazis’ framework of “The Gerrymandering of Sex” to explore how the borders of sex and gender are drawn through sociopolitical processes, locating population health research as one such process. I close by making recommendations for flexible, critical approaches to creating meaningful trans populations in survey data, focused on surfacing the role of the researcher in processes of population creation.