Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Contextualizing Transgender Individuals' Discourses About Health Insurance, Jonathan Troy Baker

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Transgender individuals face a variety of disparate health outcomes compared to cisgender individuals within the United States. Additionally, 23% to 52% of transgender individuals do not have health insurance, meaning transgender individuals are two to five times more likely than the general population to lack access to health insurance coverage. Extant research typically treats health insurance as a quantitative (yes/no) variable; thus, we do not know what (not) having insurance contextually means for transgender individuals. The current study addresses this gap by privileging the voices of 17 transgender individuals through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Using the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA), I conducted …