As recent developments in many sociopolitical contexts show, trans positionalities, especially related to healthcare, have become the focus of moral panics and many scholars have recently called for including trans voices in public health and policy processes. That policy processes should be more inclusive is also an ever-returning premise of nowadays policy making and critical policy studies have emphasized participation and deliberation as ways to foster democracy. However, the role of emotions inside these processes – as elements unconsciously shaping them and as affective agencies of those taking part in them – has been rather downplayed. To bring their voices into healthcare and policymaking, trans people must navigate a vast field of emotionally shaped gatekeeping, which I call the affective maze (Durnova & Ihrig, forthcoming). This paper thus pays attention to the affective spheres of constructing trans healthcare as a ‘problem’, applying Institutional Ethnography on the collected material of interviews, field notes and policy documents connected to trans-related healthcare in Austria. Using the WPR approach (Bacchi, 2016), my upcoming analysis will discuss how medical professionals and politicians alike (re-) act in this affective maze and find various explanations for the ongoing, pathologising approach to trans-related healthcare and policies in Austria. This can not only reveal what blocks putting theory into practice but offers new perspectives to renegotiate allocations of agency.
