Queers will find queers anywhere
ethnographic research
Team: Emily Franklin
Role: research, analysis
Overview:
As part of a mutual interest in how minorities, particularly, those in the LGBTQ+ family interact with healthcare systems, Emily and I embarked upon research to understand how Trans and Gender Nonconforming (TGNC) individuals experience the journey of getting top surgery.
Process:
Privileging deep relationship building we conducted our research with four participants. We started the with open ended ethnographic interviews, provided cultural probes for participants to take home and document their experience over time and exit interviews.
Emily and I then coded all the interviews and cultural probes to make sense of the data.
Result:
While this project was just a research pilot a lot of important insights, and of course, questions, emerged. While reflecting on our coding insights we identified the following categories/themes as both intriguing findings and as future points of design intervention:
Sexual health is incredibly intrinsic and unique to individual populations - For us, STI screenings and prevention are a major part of our sexual health experience, but topics like STI screenings/prevention were barely mentioned in our interviews. If anything they were coaxed out of our participants.
Binary as violence - While this might not seem groundbreaking, the pervasiveness and diversity of the problem is. Binary within the trans community and expectations of how a transman/transwoman should represent, the binary within being a GNC person and having to use binary language in order to seek confirming medical care.
Toxic masculinity - Even though the trans community is incredibly supportive, biases exist within the queer community. Particularly there is a pressure within the transmasc community to represent in a ‘masculine’ way.
The complexity of language - Language became a significant theme in our body of work. It was the very first entry point into our reflexive process and it became a constantly recurring theme throughout each interview. Participants spoke of the appropriation of medical language to describe trans health experiences (using language about diseases or conditions as a means to describe their impending surgeries, e.g. having to describe ‘top surgery’ as a double bilateral mastectomy which immediately invokes the vernacular of cancer); the reinforcement of binary language through medical and insurance forms; and the disparity between patient emotional journeys and medical needs of doctors/the medical world.
Systems of care - In our interviews we discussed care well beyond interactions with the official system, and extending past requirements for top surgery. The namesake of our project is a direct quote from one of our participants talking about one of these informal networks of care.
This research helped reveal new areas of inquiry such as:
HMW create non-binary language systems within the medical community?
HMW create medical systems that meet medical requirements without alienating peoples identities?
HMW we leverage the vast informal networks of care within the Trans/GNC community to elucidate process opacity?
