‘Bye-bye boobies’: normativity, deservingness and medicalisation in transgender medical crowdfunding

Abstract

Transgender individuals experience multiple barriers to accessing care related to medical transition, including a shortage of providers as well as health insurance programmes that categorically exclude the provision of gender-affirming hormones and surgery. Like people seeking financial support for health care related to illness or injury, many transgender people utilise web-based crowdfunding to help pay for medical transition costs. Although a growing body of research finds that medical crowdfunding individualises the effects of health inequalities, little of this research has focused specifically on trans crowdfunding. A dataset of 410 crowdfunding campaigns for medical transition was created. The majority of online campaigns were used to fund chest surgeries among young, white, binary-identified trans men in the USA. On average, campaigns raise only about 25% of their fundraising goal. Using thematic narrative analysis, I find that campaign narratives exhibit several main themes: trans 101, biological essentialism, insurance access, deservingness, normative transition and notions of progress. These themes illustrate how transgender medical crowdfunding is a response to inequalities but also has the effect of reproducing them.