UN/CERTAIN CARE

This project employed ethnographic methods to analyse the 2010 removal of les troubles précoces de l’identité de genre from the list of affections psychiatriques de longue durée by the French Minister of Health – an act government and media outlets described as a depathologization of la transsexualité. Following from this change, the thesis explores the relations between the French nation-state and this and related initiatives that signal the increasing, yet ambivalent, incorporation of trans subjects into the French national imaginary. The work was based on policy and media analyses, together with two years of fieldwork about the implications of these changes on the entangled practices of medical and legal transition in the country. Fieldwork based with select teams of la Société française d’étude et de prise en charge du transsexualisme – a national group of specialised care providers – enabled an exploration of the ideological tensions, care practices and forms of life that emerge in relation to growing pressures for depathologization.