Article ID: CBB804149903

Bureaucratizing Medicine: Creating a Gender Identity Clinic in the Welfare State (2022)

unapi

This essay considers the creation of a gender identity clinic at Rikshospitalet, the National Hospital of Norway, in the early 2000s and its implications for the production of medical knowledge during that era. In the preceding decades, medical transition was overseen by an informal, self-organized, multidisciplinary team of medical experts, but this situation changed when a centralized gender identity clinic was established under psychiatric control. The essay argues that shifting institutional, societal, economic, legal, and bureaucratic circumstances redistributed expertise and authority on trans medicine. Economic framing, institutional frictions, patient activism, and media attention restricted the doctors’ room for maneuver and created a scientific crisis of legitimacy in trans medicine. These processes changed medical knowledge regarding medical transition; eventually, “sex change” and, therefore, all that is denoted by “sex” became intertwined with and inseparable from the politico-bureaucratic processes of reforming a modern public health-care system and welfare state. By anchoring the analysis in the history of science and expertise, this inquiry offers a new focus on the role of bureaucratic practices in the production, structuring, and circulation of medical knowledge in the welfare state.

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Authors & Contributors
Marchildon, Gregory P.
Käthe von Bose
Bramanti, Barbara
Stenseth, Nils Christian
Sarah F. Liebschutz
Sampsa Saikkonen
Journals
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Social History of Medicine
Social Studies of Science
Renaissance Studies
NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin
Medical History
Publishers
Duke University Press
McGill University (Canada)
Bryn Mawr College, Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research
Wallstein Verlag
Routledge
Oxford University Press
Concepts
Health care
Hospitals and clinics
Social welfare
Public health
Medicine and government
Authority of medicine
People
Galen
Clinton, Bill
Celsus, Aulus Cornelius
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
19th century
Early modern
Modern
Places
Europe
United States
Canada
Oslo (Norway)
Levant and Near East
Miami (Florida)
Institutions
University of Oslo
University of Miami
National Health Service (Great Britain)
American Medical Association
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