transition – Han Koehle

I was so excited to participate in the UCLA Body Liberation Series and I’m even more excited to be able to share links to both my talk and some of the other amazing talks in this series. This talk gave me an opportunity to zoom in on the way gender norms posit implicit duties of nonfatness for people of all genders, and how that works for people approaching navigating gender transition. If you want to read more about my work on antifatness and transition, there will also be a chapter on this part of my work in the forthcoming volume of Advances in Gender Research which should be out in November of this year.

I’m really pleased that UCLA asked me for permission to record my talk and that they’re making these videos available beyond the UCLA community. It’s really important to me to be able to make my work as available as possible, because a lot of people who need access to research and educational materials don’t have the funding to buy access to it.

If you’d like to support my work and help me make things available as widely as possible, share my work with friends and colleagues! You can also support my work financially by making a one-time donation at ko-fi or (brand new!) by joining my Patreon. There’s reward tiers tailored for individual, clinician, and organizational patrons.

Thanks for being here, and I’d love to know what you think of the UCLA talks!

I am taking time away from work due to health issues and will be unlikely to generate new content over the next month, so this feels like a great opportunity to share some older material that may still be useful. First up, my thesis! This study explores narratives of gender legitimacy as they are moderated by fatness for trans people in early transition, and how that is further moderated by specific gender identity and race.

This is something I wrote several years ago now, and I wouldn’t have made all the same choices, particularly in how I talk about BMI. Although I was critical of BMI when I wrote this and I still am now, my criticism has developed considerably and the framing I chose is pretty dramatically different from what I would say now. Still, I think it’s generally a useful paper and I don’t know that I’m ever going to get around to editing it for formal publication.

Read the thing!Download

As always you can support my work financially by donating at ko-fi, and I always love to get comments.

Tag: transition

UCLA: Gender is the Opposite of Fat

Anti-Fat Bias as a Barrier to Gender Transition Care