How does the practice of regulation, pathologization, and gatekeeping of trans experiences work to construct cisgender as well as transgender subjectivity?

Put another way: how does the organizational/institutional ordering of transmedicine work to naturalize the cisgender subject? what, by requiring trans people to appropriately demonstrate their need and suitability for care, do cis people gain (economically and ideologically)?

Thinking particularly about FFS, for example, it’s interesting to consider how forcing trans women to constantly and stringently account for themselves as authentic patients serves also to naturalize gender and establish cisgender womanhood as biological and uncontested (1/2)

(2/2) which is particularly interesting given that we know historically that womanhood has always been a contested, shifting, socially constructed experience—and that biologization is often a technique of patriarchy/misogyny, as well as racism.

Have also been thinking a lot about how the cisgender regulation of transmedicine, even under the most ostensibly liberal models, rests on saneism that sees deviance as “Madness;” within the rubric of mental illness, we must demonstrate both sickness AND the capacity to be cured.

Have thought about this a bit before, and my friend Arielle had good things to say about it in an article, but I think there’s so much more to excavate on this subject. Everything always seems to come back to the notion of “rationality.” https://www.dailyxtra.com/does-the-concept-of-a-trans-brain-help-or-hurt-our-communities-151495

At the risk of muddying the waters here I think there’s perhaps something here akin to what Said identifies re: Orientalism, in that the Other is a fundamental component in the construction of the Self; any notions of “normal” also require the naming and defining of “deviance”