I grew up in the Leesburg, Virginia area until my mid-teens, when I moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. My first career was as a photojournalist and fine art photographer, through which I fell in love with teaching and with documenting and exploring the social world. I was an artist in residence at the Erotic Heritage Museum, where I coordinated educational programming in the arts. Through this work I also became aware of how formal and informal structures of power generate vulnerability along predictable vectors, and became politically active in feminism, especially in work addressing structural vulnerability to sexual violence.
Around 2012 I became interested in health disparities impacting trans people and returned to school, attending Riverside City College (RCC), where my intellectual development was heavily influenced by close community with philosopher Jessica Rosewillow, anthropologist Naifa Al-Anbar, and writer Nik Valdez. I completed a BA in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I had the privilege to study with Howard Winant, Kevin Anderson, Lisa Hajjar, Geoffrey Raymond, and Vanessa Thompson. I worked especially closely with Zakiya Luna, who supervised my Honors Thesis on anti-fat bias as a barrier to gender transition. I finished with distinction in the major.
During my time at UCSB I was heavily involved with trans-centered organizing, including co-chairing a peer sex education program centered on queer and trans sexuality and ultimately leading a coalition campaign to demand equitable treatment for trans students in campus healthcare facilities. UCSB administrators asked me to join their staff in 2017 to further develop solutions and establish the institutional scaffolding for a health equity program. This program is exceptional in many ways. Built around a community-engaged framework, this program is the first of its kind to center trans people and to centrally orient toward intersectionality and coalitional linked fate from its inception. Health equity programs were in their earliest days at this time; it would be another eighteen months until the American Medical Association would launch their Center for Health Equity.
Between 2017 and 2022 I was proud to work closely with campus partners and student groups to document and address health equity concerns, with particular attention to culturally appropriate healthcare for LGBTQIA+ and religious minority students; racial bias in diagnosis and prescribing; structural inequities in insurance coverage and service availability; and community policing. During this time I completed a community-accountable population health study under the supervision of psychologist Sharleen O’Brien.
“Talking to them is like entering a bright, wondrous library of social justice wisdom staffed by a good-humored, badass librarian”
Ylfa Perry, MD
Interim Director of Clinical Education
Sketchy Medical
In 2021 I earned a Masters in Social Work at the University of Southern California, including a year’s clinical internship at the Isla Vista Neighborhood Clinic under the supervision of social worker Max Rorty. Completing a clinical internship in the early months of the pandemic gave me a unique view of our health system before and during transformative crisis.
Over the last several years I have been asked to share some of these lessons as a guest lecturer in medicine, psychology, public health, sociology, and philosophy, and to partner with organizations committed to advancing health equity.
In 2022 I moved to St. Louis to pursue a PhD in Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, where my interest in health justice continues to motivate my research.
My work is deeply informed by being in community with colleagues and comrades like sociologist Blu Buchanan, historian Hannah Kagan-Moore, and philosopher Rebecca Harrison.
Han Koehle 