ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ways of theorising how transness and disability are entangled and disentangled in movements towards transgender depathologisation, as well as in theories of gender and disability. Considering how formations of transness and disability both have vexed relationships to medicalisation, I review how models of disability are useful in theorising transgender identity. I take the work of Dean Spade (2003) to provide insights on how these points of convergence and dissonance materialise in legislation, as well as healthcare practices. Spade’s work allows us to reconsider how ‘transgender’ and ‘disability’ are differently regulated categories, and that sociopolitical factors influence one’s capacity to access the category of disability. In doing so, this chapter deploys a two-fold meaning of ‘access’, shifting emphasis from the question of accessible infrastructures, and social worlds, to the question of the ability to access the identity category ‘disability’. Here the work of Jasbir Puar’s (2018) on ‘debility’ is crucial to explore the epistemological coherence of the identity categories of disability and transness.
