ABoUT The Author
Marko Tanjga (he/him) is a junior at Grace Church School in New York City. He is a strong proponent of democracy and is committed to preventing authoritarian rulers from undermining it. Marko has also done independent research on a variety of topics, including authoritarianism and his most recent work “Preaching Rights, Practicing Control: Trans Pathologization in the Netherlands and the United States.” His project, stopauthoritarianism.org, is a national network of high school-aged educators who help teach the value of democracy to young students. At Grace Church, aside from being the captain of the debate team, he has established the school’s first Amnesty International chapter and has used it to launch mailing campaigns on a wide variety of issues.
Abstract
In recent years, LGBTQ rights and specifically trans rights have been recognized as human rights and developed western countries have voiced support for them. However, in many such developed countries, the government often uses medicine as a facade to cover up the oppression of trans communities. Whether it be through requiring sterilization for trans people or by banning puberty blockers and hormones, governments will pathologize trans people enough to control them but not to the extent where proper care is provided. This paper will examine the pathologization of trans people broadly and then look to the Netherlands as a case study of how a government can enforce anti-trans policy through the lens of medicine while simultaneously projecting itself as a trans rights leader. From there, this paper will turn to the contemporary US, where trans oppression operates through a different medical lens, and draw similarities between it and the Netherlands.
Preaching Rights, Practicing Control: Trans Pathologization in the Netherlands and the United States
Check out or Join Marko’s Democracy Project: Stop Authoritarianism
From a young age, I inherited my parents' love for politics with my father coming from authoritarian Serbia and my mother coming from socialist Canada. Throughout middle school I explored this interest in a variety of ways, but it was only at the end of eighth grade that this interest manifested specifically in authoritarianism.
The catalyst for my curiosity was when I sat in on a high school class as a middle school student called New Czar in the Kremlin: Putin’s Russia which studied authoritarianism and dictators around the world. In this class, there was an in-class debate regarding if there was a point to the facade of democracy in Russia. This opened up a whole new facet of politics for me because it was not the terms of democracy that were being debated but the very existence of democracy. This was both fascinating and horrifying for me, as I grew up accustomed to democracy and firmly believed that it was the path towards a better society at all times. I became even further interested in this topic when I witnessed the continued political polarization and the erosion of democratic norms in American politics. Since then, I have joined Ballers for Ed Reform to blog about the impact of authoritarianism of public education and intellectual freedom and have also been selected for the National Youth Advocacy Corps at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to more deeply explore this topic.