Extractive Abandonment Trans-Crip Materialism in Transgender Health Care

This article locates trans-crip affinities in how transgender and disabled embodiment function as a site of value extraction for both statecraft and capital accumulation. In doing so, this article situates itself between emerging scholarship at the intersection of transgender and disability studies, and materialist analyses of health care. Nascent trans-crip theorizing has emphasized the centrality of “alignment” and “incongruence” as ways of describing trans/crip experiences in the world that sidestep pathologizing medical frameworks centering the “wrongness” of the body. In particular, trans theorists have turned to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “misfit,” a concept that indexes how disability is constituted in the incongruence between body and world. This article points to the limits of that model, arguing that both alignment and incongruence between the trans/crip body and the world are sites of extraction. Building on Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant’s conceptualization of “extractive abandonment,” this article offers a materialist reading of transgender health care in the Netherlands, demonstrating trans-crip affinities in how value is generated out of the regulation and management of unwanted bodies.