title: Understanding Transgender and Medically Assisted Gender Transition: Feminism as a Critical Resource.
abstract: Feminism has fought the trivialization of women's experiences, championed women's security, and insisted on respect for women's choices. In so doing, feminism has developed important perspectives on the complicated connections between what gender means as it plays itself in people's lives, and the inequalities of power and authority that structure much of human experience. Here, I put a few of these perspectives into contact with an issue where the interactions of gender and power are squarely in play: medicine's role in assisting gender transitioning generally and, specifically, the enduring controversy between medicine and many transgender people about the pathologization of transgender and the role of clinicians as gatekeepers to gender-transition interventions.
authors.affiliation: Professor of philosophy at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. She is also a fellow of the Hastings Center and co-editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.
authors.forename: Jamie Lindemann
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Nelson
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D034462:Dissent and Disputes; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D020793:Gatekeeping; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D062528:Medicalization; D008511:Medicine; D011209:Power, Psychological; D057829:Gender-Affirming Procedures; D063106:Transgender Persons; D014933:Women's Rights