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Short abstract:

This presentation explores the difficulties of building and sharing archives on transgender health, science, and medicine in an era of increasingly anti-trans authoritarian politics. Drawing on digital and ethnographic data, it considers the challeges of information sharing across communities.

Long abstract:

In 2021, a group of transphobic reactionaries began targeting clinics in the United States that provide care to trans people. Clinics and the providers working in them received repeated threats of violence, bombing, or death. Reactionaries identified these sites of practice with a Google Map that was initially generated by a trans health activist to share clinics that offered informed consent-driven care to trans people. The repurposed map--which circulated among fundamentalist, white nationalist, MAGA, and “gender critical” groups--was initially shared by the self-described radical feminist group, Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF). This comprises one example of the ways in which efforts to produce sharable information about trans health, science, and medicine within communities of research, practice, and utilization has been appropriated by an increasingly organized reactionary coalition. These archives—often generated by trans people to improve formal or informal care networks within and for trans communities—are increasingly being mobilized against their intended purpose to justify restricted legislation, manufacture public consensus, or agitate reactionary violence against trans people. Given that transgender health, science, and medicine have long been a site of struggle, how do trans health proponents navigate new and increasingly authoritarian opponents to their care and flourishing? The paper draws on data from digital ethnography and interviews with providers and activists in the United States and Argentina to investigate the limits and possibilities of information-sharing in an emerging epoch of anti-trans fascist politics.