Archives Against the Gender Clinic: Historicising Britain’s Trans Health Crisis

This LGBT+ History Month, Dr Jack Doyle explores the history of the UK’s ongoing – and often overlooked – trans healthcare crisis. While J.K. Rowling and American challenges to trans youth’s healthcare provision frequently make the headlines, few outside British and Irish trans communities are aware that transition-related care has become virtually inaccessible through the NHS.

This talk considers the complex history of the current crisis alongside other queer health crises like HIV/AIDS, explores what’s unique about British medical approaches to gender and sexual nonconformity, and draws on the speaker’s own experience as a historian and long-time queer health organiser to offer historically informed ways forward towards trans health justice.

The lecture is being organised by the LGBT+ Advisory Group and the Equality and Diversity Unit, in collaboration with the Faculty of Law. It will be followed by a drinks reception.

Speaker

Dr Jack Doyle is a historian of war and queerness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on the British, French, and American empires. He is especially interested in military communities as sites of culturally specific violence and of distinct gendered and sexual cultures. As the History Faculty’s first Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ history, he is passionate about developing collaborative queer, trans, and antiracist pedagogical practice.

His current research explores the regulation of gender and sexuality in First World War British military justice systems across the Empire. This work is an attempt to explore the cross-cultural consequences of British anti-sodomy and gender regulating law during the mass mobilisation of a global conflict, focusing on courtmartials of British, Commonwealth, and colonial soldiers tried for indecency and related charges. He also writes about trans and gender nonconforming experiences in POW camps during the Second World War, and about post-war grassroots queer healthcare networks.

His work builds on his early research into unconventional combatant cultures in ‘unprecedented’ global conflicts, particularly fighter pilot communities during the World Wars. His doctoral thesis, which he is currently developing as a monograph, examined French, British, and American experiences and practices of aerial violence during the First World War. He draws from a mix of cultural and military history in his work, drawing on combat theory, wartime identity, class and labour politics, tactical and strategic studies, and queer studies.