Always Already Geopolitical: Trans Health Care and Global Tactical Technical Communication

Abstract

Transgender persons face many barriers preventing them from accessing and receiving health care. Gender-transition care can be difficult because such care is frequently contingent upon geopolitics, such as location-based health-care policies that exclude transgender community attitudes and values. This article uses rhetorical cluster analysis to explore the combining two conceptual lenses-tactical technical communication and participatory localization-to study the do-it-yourself geopolitical medical literacies of transgender people in one Reddit forum. We found being trans online means to be tactical and geopolitical, encountering and negotiating geopolitical awareness of health-care options, exposing a privilege invisible to cisgender users.

“It’s like my kid came back overnight”: Experiences of trans and non-binary young people and their families seeking, finding and engaging with clinical care in England

“…However, depending on the type of medication there can be a risk of undesired feminising physical effects caused by estrogen (Nahata, Chelvakumar, and Leibowitz 2017). In the context of long waiting lists, deliberately slow-paced clinical protocols and limited access to medication, many TNB people children, young people and adults in England have recourse to private clinical care via online TNB medical services such as GenderGP (Edenfield, Colton and Holmes 2019).…”

Taking the Tactical Out of Technical: A Reassessment of Tactical Technical Communication

“…The preceding discussion of strategies and tactics provided by Kimball (2006) is substantively tracked in each of the subsequent articles on TTC (Colton et al., 2017; Ding, 2018; Edenfield et al., 2019a, 2019b; Holladay, 2017; McCaughey, 2020; Pflugfelder, 2017; Reardon et al., 2017; Sarat-St. Peter, 2017; Sarat-St. Peter & St. Peter, 2020; Towner, 2013; Van Ittersum, 2014). There are no significant changes made to Kimball’s (2006) basic approach.…”

“…(2019b) called TTC “an older concept” (p. 181). At most, authors seek to complicate TTC with additional matters such as ethical/social justice considerations (Colton et al., 2017; Edenfield et al., 2019a, 2019b), cocreation (Reardon et al., 2017), or other theories (Edenfield et al., 2019b; Sarat-St. Peter & St. Peter, 2020). However, there have been no articles, which reevaluate the work de Certeau (1984) to determine whether its precepts fully support TTC.…”

Trans Oppression Through Technical Rhetorics: A Queer Phenomenological Analysis of Institutional Documents

“…(We use “trans ” throughout this article as an umbrella term to refer to nonbinary, transgender, transsexual, agender, and other gender-expansive identities.) Trans people remain a marginalized population that, with few exceptions (Cox, 2019; Edenfield et al, 2019a; Edenfield et al, 2019b), has been absent from technical communication scholarship. Trans people may experience oppression in multiple overlapping vectors, including health care, employment, housing, and community safety (Bauer et al, 2009; Gehi & Arkles, 2007; Grant et al, 2011).…”