Sahar Sadjadi Anthropology, Medicine, Science and technology studies |
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03.07.2017-31.08.2017
Beautiful Children: Medicine and The Future of Transgender Identity
Sahar Sadjadi is a physician, anthropologist and assistant professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender studies at Amherst College. She is currently completing a book based on an ethnographic multi-sited study of the clinical practices around gender non-conforming children in the US and the revision of the psychiatric category, Gender Identity Disorder in Children. During her residency at Brocher Foundation, she will primarily focus on writing a chapter of the book manuscript about puberty suppression, a treatment that has recently emerged in Western Europe and North America for transgender children. This chapter offers an original clinical history of puberty suppression and explores the existing medical knowledge about the treatment outcomes and side effects of puberty blockers for children brought under the clinical purview. It examines the temporal and affective politics of this preemptive intervention, in order to explain the enthusiastic embrace of this new medicalization of childhood gender nonconformity.