Far too often, access to medical services for transgender people has depended on constructing transgender phenomena as symptoms of a mental illness or physical malady, partly because “sickness” is the condition that typically legitimizes medical intervention. It’s also important to recognize that many of the genital surgeries that became available to later generations of transgender people were developed by practicing on the bodies of enslaved black women who were subjected to medical experimentation, and that these procedures were used nonconsensually on the bodies of intersex youth.
