Trans-Medicine-Beyond-War, Histories from Colonial Casablanca and Cairo

In March 2024, Beshouy Botros and Léopold met in a cafe in New Haven in the United States. Beshouy described their research, and more particularly some aspects of what they write about in the following text. This was the genesis for this issue which was timed so that this text could be included. In it, Beshouy builds a historical reflection around two “gender clinics” in colonial Casablanca and Cairo, and how to understand the foundational infrastructures for medical transition in relation to these very particular temporal and spatial circumstances.

The culture wars being waged on trans people’s bodies seem paradoxically ethnocentric and universal: ethnocentric because the extrapolation of gendered structures from two ostensibly opposite biological sexes is specific (though not unique) to Western Christendom, and universal because, ironically, gender essentialists around the world critique trans and non-binary identities as academic fabrications baked in North American and European universities. Battles over the legal definition of sex, access to public bathrooms, the banning of books about feminism and critical race theory and attacks on their authors ensue; trans people are in danger everywhere.

Where returns to when. What gets lost amidst narratives of crisis in the present are the concrete and conceptual histories that shaped the medicalization of transition and contemporary trans subjectivities. The delineation of dimorphic biological sexes, male/female, and their yoking to two genders was a social and scientific endeavor that spanned continents, species, and centuries. In contrast, its denaturalization through the valorization of other kinds of gendered embodiment and relations has only recently begun. Taking this long view, trans and feminist movements challenging the immutability of sex and gender have accomplished a lot in a few short decades. But it might be time to course correct; as it stands “transness” risks being overdetermined by medical studies and their clinical logics and underdetermined by queer theories on the performativity of gender.