Jurisdiction in Trans Health

Abstract

This article utilizes a novel framework to analyse the contested boundaries between law and medicine. Bringing theoretical and empirical insights together, it expands recent socio‐legal scholarship on jurisdiction. Jurisdictional analysis is conducted in an under‐researched area of health law – namely, the accessibility of trans‐related health care. The article draws upon the first qualitative research project to assess the impact of self‐declaration of legal gender status in Denmark. This was adopted in 2014, at the same time as access to hormones and surgeries was centralized and restricted. The combined impact of these reforms disappointed the trans people interviewed, which demonstrates the importance of identifying how legal and medical norms interrelate. Jurisdictional analysis helps to illuminate how law was used to develop and protect professional competencies. Such insights will be valuable for researchers interested in the potential of self‐declaration, and for scholars of health law and socio‐legal studies more generally.

Constructing Risk through Jurisdictional Talk: The Ontario Review Board Process under Part XX.1 of the Criminal Code

“…As Mariana Valverde (2015) reminds us, though, the spatiotemporal and affective inflections of social life mediated by the techniques of jurisdiction are intertextual; each is the product-effect of heterogeneous, and potentially conflictual, practices brought into relation with each other. While that move by critical legal theorists potentially radically reimagines jurisdiction with respect of social and physical forms not commonly treated as the proper subject of law, and with respect of practices distant from text or talk (e.g., Barr 2016; Davies 2022; Shaw 2020a), the approach has also been applied to make sense of the effects of legal forms on judicial or quasi-judicial reasoning, as well as in policy settings where text and talk dominate (see, e.g., Dietz 2020; Garland and Travis 2020; Pasternak 2014; Shaw 2020b). Drawing on theories of jurisdiction, we see the citational work done in the NCR process as a form of jurisdictional talk—“stretches of talk” (Smith 2005, 166), written and oral, that take on a metastable, replicable form, and accordingly authorize particular ways of encountering NCR individuals.…”

“…Within the structure of this determinate relationship, the modular, citational practice is inescapably relational, becoming the intertextual space from which the ORB’s decision-making is made. The disposition that results: (1) affects apportionments of responsibility, and the authority to effect that responsibility, to others in the state’s care (see e.g., Dietz 2020; Garland and Travis 2020); and (2) congeals in the prospective, speculative imaginaries of the ORB that are implicated in ongoing relationships of responsibility through their review and issuance of disposition orders. In other words, jurisdictional talk creates a way in which the ORB renders mental disorders legible to them and extends those modalities of governance into the context of forensic care.…”

Depathologising Gender: Vulnerability in Trans Health Law

“…However, even if more states are willing to remedy this by stepping into what has come to be regulated as a purely medical jurisdiction (Dietz, 2020), human rights concepts such as personal autonomy and bodily integrity offer few pointers as to what active steps need to be put in place in order to ensure the consistent and universal provision of accessible health care. Moreover, while a significant body of human rights scholars and activists would point to international successes in gaining recognition of economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights in numerous areas, there have been few examples of this in the trans health context to date.…”

“…intersects with legal gender recognition processes or the accessibility of health care provision (Pearce, 2018;Dietz, 2020). This chapter is more forward-looking, assessing the potential of a human right to depathologisation.…”

“…Trans health has been wellresearched in sociology (Davy, 2011;Pearce, 2018;Vincent, 2020) and history (Meyerowitz, 2002;Gill-Peterson, 2018). Though trans issues have become more prominent within health law (Sørlie, 2018;Dietz, 2020), they are yet to become an established topic of study in this field. 2 Drawing upon developments in Argentina, Denmark, Uruguay, and the UK, this chapter seeks to address this deficit, developing a new research agenda for trans health law.…”