Medicine and Childhood Gender Nonconformity

Özyeğin University's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences invites you to "Medicine and Childhood Gender Nonconformity", the third event of the talk series titled Reproductive Technologies, Gender and Medicine. Assist. Prof. Sahar Sadjadi from McGill University will join us as the speaker together with Assoc. Prof. Berna Zengin from Özyeğin University as the moderator. The event will take place online via Zoom on the 19th of January 2022 between 17:00 and 18:30. 

Please click here for the event registration.

Note: The event will be in English.

Abstract

In recent years, the field of clinical management of gender in children has expanded and new approaches to gender variant children have emerged in North America and Western Europe. How do these clinical approaches comprehend and treat childhood gender nonconformity, and how did children's gender become a matter of health and illness? This talk explores these questions by analyzing the revision of the psychiatric category of Gender Identity Disorder in Children for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5), and its re-naming to Gender Dysphoria.

Assist. Prof. Sahar Sadjadi

Sahar Sadjadi is Assistant Professor of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. She studied medicine at Tehran University, worked as a physician in an emergency room in Iran, and received her Ph.D. in medical anthropology from Columbia University. Prior to joining McGill University, she was faculty member at Amherst College. She has held research fellowships at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Paris Unsitute for Advanced Study, and Princeton University. Dr. Sadjadi's research lies at the intersection of anthropology of medicine, gender, and sexuality studies. She is interested in the cultural conceptions of the relation between the body and the self that inform medical thought and practice. She conducted a multi-sited ethnography of the clinical practices that have emerged around childhood gender nonconformity in the United States. Her research has been funded by The Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Brocher Foundation.