Emmett Harsin Drager
“Too Much Mother: Transsexual Etiology, Gender Clinics, and the Pathologization of the Racialized Family”
Monday, April 18th, at 4pm, via Zoom
In the 1960s and 1970s, many patients made their way to university gender clinics via state psychiatric hospitals and/or the criminal justice system. These patients, often people of color, provided the foundation for early theories of transsexual etiology. Their stories foreground how psychiatric detention and unfreedom were necessary conditions for the production of modern sex and gender.
Emmett Harsin Drager is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Their dissertation, “To Be Seen: Transsexuals and the Gender Clinics,” is about the history and trajectory of trans therapeutics in the US.