Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

A Crisis Of Erasure: Transgender And Gender-Nonconforming Populations Navigating Breast Cancer Health Information, Curtis Shane Tenney, Karl J. Surkan, Lynette Hammond Gerido, Dawn Betts-Green

STEMPS Faculty Publications

In this paper, we use the topic of breast cancer as an example of health crisis erasure in both informational and institutional contexts, particularly within the transgender and gender-nonconforming population. Breast cancer health information conforms and defaults to conventional cultural associations with femininity, as is the case with pregnancy and other “single-sex” conditions (Surkan, 2015). Many health information and research practices normalize sexualities, pathologize non-normative gender (Drescher et al., 2012; Fish, 2008; Müller, 2018), and fail to recognize gender-nonconforming categories (Frohard‐Dourlent et al., 2017). Because breast cancer health information is sexually normalized, an information boundary exists for the LGBTQ+ community, …