This thesis explores how current ways of imagining possibilities for intersexed and trans embodied lives within medical contexts might be informed by and reimagined through the historical lived experiences of intersexed and trans individuals as they have been articulated in autobiographical accounts.

Postmodern, queer, intersex, and trans researchers and activists have criticised existing standards of intersex and trans healthcare for limiting the possibilities for diverse embodied lives by articulating certain forms of embodiment and selfhood as more likely to enable a liveable life than others. This has often been done in a medico-legal context by referring to experiences in the past of the unliveability of corporealities and gendersexed situations that differ from privileged positions. With a point of departure in these critiques, this thesis reopens questions about how intersexed and trans people may be embodied and have relations with others by reflecting upon the period of the first three-quarters of the 20th century, when the present standards of care and diagnostic categories were emerging, but had not yet become established.

Drawing upon a unique set of historical source material from the archives of the Danish Ministry of Justice and the Medico-Legal Council, intersexed and trans persons’ life stories are rearticulated from their own and medico-legal experts’ accounts written in relation to applications for change of legal gendersex status and medical transition. In this way, the process is traced through which these life stories have been repeatedly rearticulated in order to become a usable basis for diagnosis and decision-making. At the same time, the stories are unfolded once more in a rearticulation focusing on their complexity and diversity.

Denna avhandling undersöker hur nuvarande sätt att föreställa sig möjligheter för intersexuella och transpersoners liv inom medicinska sammanhang kan informeras av och omföreställas genom historiska livserfarenheter hos intersexuella och transindivider, som de har artikulerats i självbiografiska berättelser.

Postmoderna, queer, intersex- och transforskare och aktivister har kritiserat existerande normer för intersex- och transhälsovård för att begränsa möjligheterna för olika förkroppsligande liv genom att artikulera vissa former av förkroppsligande och subjektivitet som mer sannolikt att möjliggöra ett levbart liv än andra. Detta har ofta gjorts i ett medicinskt-juridiskt sammanhang genom att hänvisa till förflutna erfarenheter av levbarhet kring förkroppsligande och genusifierande situationer som skiljer sig från privilegierade positioner.

Med utgångspunkt i denna kritik, återupptar denna avhandling frågor om hur intersexuella och transpersoner kan bli förkroppsligade och ha relationer till andra, genom att reflektera kring de första tre fjärdedelarna av nittonhundratalet när de nuvarande normerna för vård och diagnostiska kategorier uppstod, men ännu inte blivit etablerade. Med utgångspunkt i en unik uppsättning av historiskt källmaterial från Danska  Justitiedepartementet och Medicinsk-Etiska Rådets arkiv, återges intersexuella och transpersoners livshistorier från egna och medicinsk-etiska experters berättelser skrivna i relation till ansökningar av förändring av juridiskt kön och medicinsk transition. Genom denna process har livshistorier upprepande gånger blivit omartikulerade för att bli en användbar grund för diagnos och beslutsfattande. Samtidigt är dessa livshistorier uppöppnade än en gång i en omartikulation med fokus på deras komplexitet och mångfald.

Contributing to both ageing research and queer-feminist scholarship, this article introduces feminist philosopher Margrit Shildricks queer notion of the monstrous to the subject of ageing and the issue of dealing with frailty within ageing research. The monstrous, as a norm-critical notion, takes as its point of departure that we are always already monstrous, meaning that the western ideal of well-ordered, independent, unleaky, rational embodied subjects is impossible to achieve. From this starting point the normalizing and optimizing strategies of ageing research - here exemplified through the concept of successful ageing and the treatment of Alzheimers disease - can be problematized. The notion of the monstrous instead suggests a view on ageing and monstrous embodiment which provides room for other, different ways of being recognized as an embodied subject, and for dealing with difference, vulnerability and frailty.

Book review of the anthology Transgender experience: place, ethnicity, and visibility (2014), edited by Chantal Zabus and David Coad, Routledge, New York and London, 172 pp.

Fra 1920’erne og til i dag er testosteron blevet betegnet som ‘det mandlige kønshormon’ på trods af, at det findes i både mandlige og kvindelige kroppe. Både i den naturvidenskabelige forskning i hormoner, i daglig tale og i forskellige medier er testosteron blevet brugt som metafor for - og til tider ligefrem som et synonym for - mandlighed og maskulinitet. Det stof, mænd er gjort af spørger, hvordan og hvorfor testosteron og maskulinitet er blevet sammenkædet i dansk naturvidenskabelig forskning og hvilken betydning, denne sammenkædning har haft for kønsnormer i samfundet.

In this article, we problematise the implications of some of these familiar binaries asthey are used in the Fifty Shades trilogy. Through analysis of some of the trilogy’s narrative tropes, we investigate how the separate poles of binary oppositions are established and kept in tension in order to make clear distinctions between the two. At the same time we highlight the constant work that has to be done to obtain these distinctions and a certain form of normative violence that is performed in the story to practices andidentities that are constructed as outside the normal. In the second part of the essay, we queer these binaries by exploring alternative narratives towards which the story itself points. These grey zones and blind spots taken as a point of departure for a queer critique of the binaries and norms about sexualities that organise the story.

For centuries the genitals of humans and other mammals have been conventionally interpreted within Western medicine as the most fundamental marker of their sex. This view has been persistent simultaneously with suggestions of other biological structures (e.g. sex hormones, chromosomes, and genes) being “the real” or “fundamental” sex. Interestingly, however, genitals have generally continued to be perceived as the most important basis for the formation of normal and abnormal gender identities and sexualities. Thus specific genital morphologies have been considered to be crucial for the formation of a normal self. In this paper I explore examples of the relation between the materialisations and meanings of genitals and idea(l)s about how a normal gendered_sexed body_self should materialise taken from different Danish medical contexts in the 20thcentury. These include narratives about various technologies for materialising genitals as well as different subjects’ experiences of the materialisation of genitals such as sex reassignment surgery, sex hormone treatment, prostheses, phantom genitals, and the choice not to have genital modifications. I consider in which ways these technologies and practices and the experiential narratives have contributed to normalising and queering of genitals, and how they have reinstalled and displaced them as the center and sign of gender_sex and selfhood. In order to imagine and formulate an ethics of dealing with genital differences that might lead to (more) liveable lives for individuals with diverse body morphologies, I raise the question: Which potentials and dangers might these forms of knowledge have for thinking gender_sex and selfhood differently?

A review of Signe Bremer's PhD thesis Kroppslinjer [Body lines] on narratives on sex reassignment treatments in present-day Sweden.

The Neuroschool, and in particular the Experiment contest with which the week culminated, was a transformative experience for the 2010 Alumni. The participants were determined to continue reflecting on the ways in which this experience had affected their perspectives on research and so, scattered across the globe, each Experiment team organised a Skype meeting to discuss a list of questions derived in collaboration with Dr Giovanni Frazzetto. Their aim was to produce group dialogues that would help participants clarify what they had learned about transdisciplinarity, and which would also communicate to others the experience of taking part in The Experiment. Further, the group production of this report was itself a way in which to continue addressing the challenges of transdisciplinary collaboration.

What makes a man a man? This was the implicit question in a research project about persons born with the sex chromosomal constitution XXY performed by a group of geneticists, psychiatrists, and psychologists in Denmark in the 1960s. The article presents a analysis of how and from which premises the researchers defined whatare the characteristics of normal men and women, and when a man's body, psyche, and behaviour must be described as abnormal and pathological. Furthermore, it is demonstrated what consequenses these definitions had in the following decades for how different individuals were categorised in the Danish health care system, and for if and how they were treated medically.