The demand for transgender care is a highly politicized and contested issue. Also research regarding the issue is contested and, in the public domain, dismissed as biased, and unscientific. Moreover, transgender care itself is the object of criticisms.
This paper theorizes contestations and challenges surrounding transgender care in order to answer the question, how contestations influence the demand and organization of transgender care. Our research aims to contribute to the wellbeing of the transgender community.
We identify three interconnected challenges regarding the tension between the organization of care and the changing care demands: pathologization versus depathologization; diagnosis versus exploration; and individualized medical care versus societal pressures. These challenges operate at multiple, interconnected levels: individual (microlevel, the body-self), interpersonal (meso, the social body), and structural (macro, the political body) levels. There is a wealth of literature regarding the issue, but theories tend to focus on a single level without theorizing the interconnections. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this paper combines insights regarding the interplay between the levels and demonstrates the ambiguous effects of pathologization and depathologization; the disconnect between the medical perspective and the needs of trans people and the intricate interplay between medical care and societal attitudes toward trans and non-binary people (see also Das et al., 2023). Our findings show the need for approaches that acknowledge societal factors and the interplay of the body-self, the social body and the political body, in order to offer care that better responds to the needs of the transgender communities.
