“Do You Think I Look Like an ‘F’ Anymore?”: \nTrans Identities, Biopolitics and Navigating State and Medical Spaces in Québec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, trans persons seeking to transition face legal and medical regulation. In British Columbia and Ontario, sexual reassignment surgeries (SRS) are no longer required to legally change an individual’s gender designation. In Québec, however, trans people are still required to demonstrate proof of SRS. This thesis argues that there are two key spatial spheres that trans people must negotiate in their transition process which have received little attention in geographic work: state and medical spaces. State space will be examined by focusing on the Directeur de l’etat civil (DEC), the principle governing body of civil affairs in the province. This government agency plays a pivotal role in determining whether a person has met the legal requirements to warrant a change of gender designation. Medical space, defined as the hospitals, clinics, and psychotherapeutic offices where trans people seek guidance and support for their transition is also central to this study. This project employs a Foucauldian biopolitical framework to help structure the analysis of the embedded power relations between state and medical authorities and individuals. The population studied is trans-masculine persons living in Québec who were undergoing or who had planned to undergo transition-related medical interventions. Participants were recruited through university LGBTQ centers, as well as through trans organizations located in Montréal. The participants were interviewed following oral history interview principles. The findings of this study demonstrate that due to the restrictive regulations imposed by the Government of Québec that in legal spaces, trans persons are limited in terms of their self-determination, as they must conform to established biopolitical norms. Additionally, in medical spaces, not only do medical professionals lack awareness of trans-specific needs, but trans identities are also regulated through the documentation requirements. Overall, trans persons in Québec continue to face both legislative and medical hurdles when attempting to transition in-province.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".