The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care ed. by Zena Sharman (review)

In the last several years, queer and trans people have grown in prominence in our public discussions of policy, education, health care, and other spaces of social life. Politicians, health care practitioners, and average citizens are increasingly aware of our existence and the particular challenges we present, albeit this awareness is often not well-intentioned or informed. Indeed, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (National Center for Transgender Equality 2016), trans people, in particular, specifically avoid accessing needed health care due to either fearing negative interactions with health care providers (23 percent) or being unable to afford health care (33 percent), and those who do manage to access health care services report negative interactions, from harassment to being refused service.¹ It is not difficult to find the stories of the negative interactions; for example, transgender activist Leslie Feinberg's (1999) Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1–3) begins with a harrowing recounting of being turned away from a hospital for being trans while suffering from endocarditis. Feinberg would later die due to complications from a variety of tick-borne infections (Advocate.Com Editors, 2014).

Work done in bioethics has not kept up with the growing presence of queer and trans people in public life and especially in health care. Work done in the relatively established field of queer studies and the burgeoning field of trans studies rarely finds its way into the discussions of bioethicists; if such work is included, it is rarely treated as central to the argument of that particular article. This has the effect of producing a lacuna in which queer and trans people, and especially queer and trans people of color, exist as we navigate myriad systems of health and health care. This is particularly surprising given that, with the exception of disability, no other categories of identity have been so heavily pathologized, medicalized, and stigmatized in the histories of health care in the Western world. The invisibility of queer and trans people in our discussions of bioethics and health care more generally, or the partial admission of such voices and experiences to such discussions, is something about which feminist bioethicists ought to be concerned.

Zena Sharman's The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care is an important collection of personal essays, critical reflections, and interventions by queer and trans people that offers insights crucial for feminist and other bioethicists. As a queer, trans femme of color, many of the chapters in this volume are intimately familiar to me and resonate with my own experiences or those shared with me by friends, lovers, and acquaintances. Indeed, Sharman notes in her introduction that part of what compelled her to gather together the chapters for this anthology is that these experiences are so ubiquitous in our communities that we often have informal networks of information and anecdotes to help one another navigate the medical and legal systems we encounter. This information includes both what places or which doctors or therapists are safe for us as well as "the horror stories" and where or whom to avoid (11). A quick search on your favorite search engine will find numerous websites devoted to crowdsourcing such information. Sharman's anthology is a work of informing its readers and bearing "witness to the lived experiences of systemic and individual failures of care" experienced by queer and trans people and is consistently attentive to the intersectional nature of these failures (16).

There are thirty-four individual chapters, not including Sharman's introduction, that range in length from a single to twelve pages, so I will organize my review along three rough categories: accounts of general experiences, accounts by or primarily aimed at health care practitioners, and pieces that focus on critical remakings of health and health care. As each of these chapters engages in all of these tasks, my division should be understood as merely for the sake of offering an overview of...