ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the medical and legal management of trans health care in Denmark through a vulnerability lens. As vulnerability theorists have established, even the most powerful of our social institutions are vulnerable. Institutions are always subject to internal and external pressures, which put them at risk of critique or even failure. Though this risk is conceptually distinct from the embodied vulnerability of the humans who are governed by, or manage, such institutions, this does not mean that vulnerability is not there. This is demonstrated by the context of 2014 reforms in Denmark, which led medical regulators to respond to their perceived vulnerability by implementing a risk-averse policy that centralised access to body modification procedures at state-approved clinics. This neglected the health needs of some trans interviewees. Existing research on the neoliberal institutional management of risk has charted how institutions have become increasingly risk-averse in managing costs – irrespective of whether those are real or symbolic, financial or reputational. In this chapter, the concept of institutional vulnerability offers additional, normative, insights around a more affirmative role for state institutions. Medical institutional practices demand scrutiny, with a long-term perspective that helps them better respond to their patients’ inherent human vulnerability.
