Care in Controversial Times: How Providers are Navigating the Criminalization of Health Care

The project has three main research aims. 

• Aim 1 will identify some of the key themes in regulatory and policy landscapes that arise for people providing medical or therapeutic care to transgender patients. This will draw on document-based data in legal, regulatory, and policy domains across six countries, and will emphasize restrictions, protections, and/or punitive or criminalizing provisions across these sites of practice.
• Aim 2 will identify some of the primary challenges, concerns, and opportunities among care providers involved in gender- affirming care for transgender health in six countries (US, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Scotland, and England). This will be achieved through ethnographic interview and observation analysis among a diverse group of providers based in a range of clinical and geographic settings. 
• Aim 3 will compare the consequences for providers of gender-affirming care who navigate ongoing, new, or proposed limitations or restrictions. This will be accomplished through analysis of ethnographic interviews, observations, and media-based data across study sites. 

Through each of these distinct trajectories, I expect to identify some of the major issues at stake for care providers, care administrators, health policy regulators, legislators, and bioethicists related to restrictions on gender-affirming care. Through its ethnographic and document-based comparative analysis of gender-affirming care restrictions across the North and South America and the United Kingdom, the study will offer a thoroughly transnational analysis of care provision for trans people in an era of intensifying controversy. This will have concrete as well as indirect implications for care provision, health and bioethical policy, and legal/regulatory domains. It will also provide hospitals and health administrators with empirically based insights about how changes to policy regarding gender-affirming care affect their workforce as well as their patients. Finally, the work will be of immediate use to international professional organizations to demonstrate the impacts of criminalization and restriction on care providers as well as those seeking care.