Hey everyone! I hope I picked the right place to post this. Here is a friend's thesis. I haven't gotten to read it in full yet, but from what I've read, its great
Here's a link to the PDF:
http://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/68924/Ryan_Johnson-Trans_Futures.pdf?sequence=1And here's an abstract:
This thesis is concerned with trans politics, trans visibility, and transgender citizenship. I look at this through the lens of a history of queer medicalization and resistance, the contemporary medicalization of transgender youth, and through a consideration of race and trans necropolitics wherein privileged queers and the state extract value from the social, political, economic, and physical death of trans people of color. Central to this thesis is an analysis of the "Dutch protocol" for treating gender dysphoria in children and adolescents, and a consideration of the ways in which the medical complex is a privileged and exclusionary site of producing legible transgender citizens. More generally, this thesis troubles the logics of transgender visibility and considers what is at stake in trans visibility. This thesis argues against the idea of a normative, acceptable, and visible transgender body who is able to be incorporated into the logics of a proper patriotic citizenship. Instead, I argue that trans people are not their bodies, and that one's gender should not be necessarily discernible based on one's body. Visibility contains normative ideas that are racialized, classed, and exclusionary, and for some, visibility is troubling, dangerous, and can be deadly. In conclusion, this thesis is concerned more broadly with claims for trans rights and trans liberation and argues that trans liberation, instead of emphasizing visibility within a national culture or privileging the medical complex as a site for producing transgender citizens, should instead be centered around deprivileging visibility and the emphasis of self-determination of one's gender identity and expression, and more generally should operate in coalition with anti-racist, feminist, and queer politics.
