Reimagining Transgender Health, Medicine, and Care: Centering Global South Perspectives, Approaches, and Implications

Globally, research on transgender health has primarily centered the experiences of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) populations and communities from Western countries, especially within the domains of sexual and reproductive health and mental health. Healthcare systems, education and training programs, as well as research and policy work are consequently designed, implemented, and evaluated against Global North narratives, agendas, and logics. By and large, this has obscured and, thus, left unaddressed the complex lived realities of health needs and experiences of TGD communities within and across the Global South. When TGD communities in and from the Global South are visible health and medical spaces and discourses, narratives of suffering, inequities, and ill-being are primarily centered. This session intends to address this lacuna by bringing into conversation theoretical, empirical, methodological, and comparative studies in, from, and on the Global South at the intersection of medical sociology and transgender studies which interrogate the coloniality undergirding sociological research on transgender health. The papers in this panel may include but are not limited to the following topics and themes:

• Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-colonial notions and practices of care, well-being, and joy among TGD communities in the Global South
• Transnational and multidimensional access and pathways to gender-affirming care within and across the Global South
• Individual and collective agency and resistance within global capitalist, cisnormative, and colonial structures
• Social and political histories, creative methodologies, community-engaged research, and other approaches to studying transgender health and medicine in the Global South