D. T. McCormick (they/them/theirs)

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Purdue University

Description of Work

The research that I am presenting at the symposium is a rhetorical analysis that compares two public movements that have criticized particular forms of medicine related to sex and gender: 1) the 1990s movement against the medical treatment of intersex conditions (also known as disorders of sex development); and 2: the current movement against affirmative medical care for transgender youth. Although both movements share certain rhetorical strategies, including an appeal to protect children’s bodily integrity, they differ sharply when placed in the larger rhetorical context of sex/gender norms, medical disciplines, and the law. In that larger context, the deliberative question of how to protect a child’s body quickly becomes a juridical question of what interventions may be authorized on what terms—in other words, who may claim what on behalf of the sex of a child? By analyzing how these two movements each attempt to answer this question, I show how the rhetorical ecology of sex and medicine opens up a fault line within the public investment of care for children. I discuss the most prominent instances of legal and/or disciplinary intervention advanced by each movement, and through this comparison I map out the continuities and discontinuities between them. Ultimately, I argue that although both movements appeal to the un-intervened-upon natural body, the intersex movement has based its appeals in an affirmation of bodily autonomy, whereas the movement against trans youth care has based its appeals in an affirmation of bodily normalcy. In addition to this project, I am also currently completing a dissertation on rhetorics of drugs and recovery, focusing on the curiously overlapping histories of the early Alcoholics Anonymous and the psychiatric study of hallucinogens as a recovery treatment method.

Contact: mccormid@purdue.edu | http://dtmccormick.com