Penn State to Host Speakers on ‘Trans and Intersex Wellness’

Penn State to Host Speakers on ‘Trans and Intersex Wellness’

This is going to be sponsored by the school’s college of liberal arts. Has anyone asked why?

The College Fix reports:

Coming to Penn State this spring: ‘Critical Conversations on Trans and Intersex Wellness’

Penn State students are in for a treat this coming spring semester: The College of Liberal Arts’ Clinic and Elsewhere Speaker Series will feature a pair of, er, thought-provoking lectures based on its “Critical Conversations on Trans and Intersex Wellness.”

First up in late January is “Hell Holes or Saviors: Transnational Visions of Southeast Asian Trans Surgery” which, according to its abstract, will “investigate political economies of risk logic by looking at how transnational trans and queer studies comprehend trans people’s patronage of ‘back alley surgeons.’”

Presenter Aren Aizura, whose body of work includes contributions to Queer Necropolitics, Trans Studies: Beyond Homo/Hetero Normativities, and Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, will compare

online reviews of and videos about Pratunam Polyclinic, a walk-in aesthetic surgery clinic in Bangkok, Thailand with a large trans clientele, which some consider a “hellhole” but which others describe as a renowned center for transgender surgeries. This comparison troubles the exceptionalist logic that global north nations offer the best surgical care and yield the most satisfied trans surgery candidates. Arguing that the spectral other of the “high quality” or “caring” surgical procedure is a subject thought to be condemned to mutilation, disfigurement, and unimaginable pain and suffering, [she] show[s] how this spectralizes and marginalizes low-income trans people (particularly trans and gender nonconforming people outside the global north) who access low-cost surgical procedures as naturally risky or insensitive to “bad” care.

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