In this episode of the GenderGP podcast Helen and Marianne are joined by stef shuster (they/them), an assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State University. They discuss stef’s research on how healthcare providers respond to their trans patients - in both good ways and bad - and imagine what excellence in trans healthcare might look like.

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 Links:Doctors treating trans youth grapple with uncertainty, lack of training | The Conversation

Why We Need To End Gatekeeping | The GenderGP Podcast

stef shuster is on Twitter @stefshuster. Their book, Trans Medicine, is available from NYU Press.

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 The GenderGP PodcastExcellence in Trans HealthcareHello, this is Dr. Helen. Webberley welcome to our Gender GP podcast, where we will be discussing some of the issues affecting the trans and non-binary community in the world today, together with my co-host Marianne Oakes, a trans woman, herself and our head of therapies.

Helen:Hi everyone, Marianne and I here we have Stef Shuster here today with us, um, as our guest and as usual, I'm going to hand over to them and let them introduce themselves, tell you all about them and why they might be here and what their passion and their energy is in this area of conversation. So welcome Stef. Lovely to have you.

Stef:Yeah, thanks for having me. So I, um, I a, an assistant professor of sociology at Michigan state university, and I've spent the last decade or so studying how medical providers learn to work with trans people, um, the challenges they experience, the uncertainties they have and how gender plays out within medicine itself.

Helen:Okay. So that makes you someone that I'm really, really excited to talk to for the next hour. so you've worked on this for some years. What have you found?

Stef:Yeah, I mean, a lot of course um, so I guess I began my research going to the Kinsey Institute, which is located at Indiana university and looking at their archives and reading through medical correspondence between providers who are working in the 1950s and 60s. Um, and so I guess one of the findings from the historical work is that they really struggled. Um, knowing how to work with trans people, how to make sense of trans people, the role of therapists, um, wasn't immediate. So for some time they thought that for example, trans people represented a form of schizophrenia, right. Um, because they thought that trans people were delusional for identifying as a gender that was different from their assigned sex. And so for me, what was interesting was to begin in the archives and then to interview providers right now, working with trans people and to hear some of those similar concerns.

So I think that one of the biggest forms of uncertainty that has just carried through over the last 70 years is really that medical providers are not usually trained to work with gender, right. They're trained to work with illness and disease. And so that way of thinking about what their job is supposed to be does not map easily onto working with trans people. And so I think that just creates a lot of uncertainty for them. And it's not the uncertainty of how do I administer hormones, for example, instead,