Tracing This Body: The Factors That Shaped Identity

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Race, gender, class, and disabilities are a few characteristics that shape identity. When these intersect, people are more vulnerable to being oppressed by large systems. For example, Medicine and insurance companies – their purpose is to keep people healthy and help them receive any medical help they need at an affordable cost. However, everything from the doctors to the drugs are complex. Medicine is an institution that enforces a “perfect body” which excludes or deprives people from receiving the help they need due to their identity. People, in these specific cases trans and disabled women, are unable to make choices about their bodies because of the limitations medicine puts on them. It’s oppression that hurts both bodies and identities and both are synonymous to each other.
Transgender people constantly endure the struggle to obtain hormones that their bodies require. Michelle O’Brien, an activist who worked in a HIV service agency, shared her obstacles of being a trans woman in her speech “Tracing This Body: Transexuality, Pharmaceuticals, and Capitalism”. It’s …show more content…
O’Brien argues that, “The U.S. Federal Food and Drug Administration has not given approval for the use of any medications for transgender body modification. The federal government does not supervise, regulate, approve, or acknowledge the use of hormones to alter the gendered characteristics of one’s body” (O’Brien 58). This is what makes medicine transphobic -- “This invisibility is how these institution express their trans phobia and hatred of trans bodies. We are not seen” (O’Brien 58). If the administration refuses to regulate hormone drugs for other uses than intended, then trans people are not covered for what they need. Trans people are not in control of their bodies because they are not allowed access to required medicine. They’re bodies are denied and
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