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18 Berkeley Women's L.J. 15 (2003)
Resisting Medicine, Re/modeling Gender

handle is hein.journals/berkwolj18 and id is 21 raw text is: Resisting Medicine, Re/modeling Gender Dean Spadet INTRODUCTION How do you know you want rhinoplasty, a nose job? he inquires, fixing me with a penetrating stare. Because, I reply, suddenly unable to raise my eyes above his brown wing- tips, I've always felt like a small-nosed woman trapped in a large-nosed body. And how long have you felt this way? He leans forward, sounding as if he knows the answer and needs only to hear the words. Oh, since I was five or six, doctor, practically all my life. Then you have rhino-identity disorder, the shoetops state flatly. My body sags in relief. But first, he goes on, we want you to get letters from two psychiatrists and live as a small-nosed woman for three years... just to be sure.' Everywhere that trans2 people appear in the law, a heavy reliance on medi- Copyright © 2003, The Regents of University of California. t. Dean Spade is a transgender attorney in New York City, and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Legal Resource Program at the Urban Justice Center, a law project serving low-income transgender, transsexual, intersex and gender transgressive people. He is also the co-editor of the online journal www.makezine.org. He would like to thank Paisley Currah, Shannon Minter, Craig Willse, Boots Hanssmann, Az, Dylan Vade, Jodie Marksamer, and Chris Daley for their continued contributions to his thinking on this topic, and Tucker Culbertson for his editorial assistance. 1. RIKI ANNE WILCHINS, READ My LIPS: SEXUAL SUBVERSION AND THE END OF GENDER 63 (1997). 2. Like many communities resisting oppression, the trans community uses ever-evolving terms to describe our articulation of non-normative identities and our struggles against a coercive binary gender system. In this article, I use several terms to name the set of people my work aims to assist. I use the words trans and gender transgressive frequently. I use trans to indicate people who identify as transgender, transsexual, or within the transgender spec- BERKELEY WOMEN'S LAW JOURNAL

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