Grounding Trans-Medical Rights

Abstract

ATTENTION: This is a working draft. Please do not cite or quote to it without my explicit permission. As applied to transgender people, medical rights do not justify themselves as moral rights. When taken as a premise rather than a conclusion, they fail. I propose to discuss why this is so, and why the trans liberation movement’s historical distrust of medicalization is justified. In the trans-medical context, I argue, the implicit syllogism of medical rights fails for three reasons. First, it is utilitarian and therefore instrumental. For that reason, it is very contingent and vulnerable. Second, it is fails to fully justify the full scope of trans-medical rights. Even for those rights it does justify, it cannot demonstrate why they merit special treatment. Third, the conception of transness that it often encodes has the potential to profoundly demean. This, however, does not mean that we must abandon trans-medical rights claims. We simply need to understand what grounds them. The solution I propose borrows from the language of disability. Just as disability rights can demand both accommodation and pride, transness can coherently stake a claim to liberation and to medical care.