UCSF

Care in Transit examines the transnational emergence of transgender health care as an institutionalizing field and public entitlement. Clinical care for trans people has been classically framed as a pitched struggle between providers and patients, but coordination and negotiation increasingly characterize this relation. Care in Transit thus turns to examine sites of local and transnational collaboration (in addition to conflict), specifically in trans health’s public provision and regulation. Looking ethnographically to activists and health care providers in Buenos Aires and New York City, the project seeks to explain how these groups work together to assemble, intervene on, and refigure the infrastructures through which trans health care takes shape. While such cooperation may seem to signal an increased standardization and stabilization, I propose that it instead signals the protraction of a period of ambiguity within which a multitude of care practices and political claims can proliferate. I call this set of dynamics and practices “transmutable care,” and explore it analytically through classification, racialized citizenship, statistical politics, and feminist politics of care.