S.J. Dillon

SJ DILLON, then a graduate student at Emory University, Decatur, Georgia, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Beyond the Binary: Gender Dysphoria in Medical Discourse, Legal Discourse, and Transgender Experience in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.,” supervised by Dr. Bayo Holsey. This dissertation research project centered on the concept of gender dysphoria, which is the diagnosis required for trans people to access gender affirming medical care. It is often viewed as the legitimizer of transgender identity in the United States in medical, legal, and even queer discourses, and accrues multiple meanings as it is mobilized in different spaces. These meanings are increasingly coming into conflict and contestation as anti-transgender sentiment increases, particularly in the southern United States. Taking this multiplicity as a jumping off part, the primary research questions are: what is gender dysphoria and what does it do, to whom and for whom? The grantee focuses on the discourses that thread through the American south, in particular Atlanta, Georgia, to answer these questions. By analyzing medical discourses about gender affirming care at the national level, investigating law creation, legal imaginaries, and legislative discourses at the state level of the Georgia General Assembly, and engaging in participant observation and ethnographic interviewing at the local level amongst trans* people living in and around Atlanta, this project follows gender dysphoria through a complex landscape of usage.