娇色导航

The New Zealand Government recently launched a public consultation on the "safety and efficacy" of puberty blockers, a move that appears influenced by political pressure from populist coalition partners and the highly contested UK Cass Review. This talk draws on data from the 2021 Identify Survey, a large national community-based survey of over 4,800 young people aged 14–26 in Aotearoa New Zealand. This presentation shares key findings from a sub-sample of 329 participants who either accessed or wanted access to puberty blockers. Among the 115 young people who had accessed puberty blockers, 87 responded to an open-ended question about how gender-affirming medications had affected their lives. The vast majority (95%) described positive or extremely positive impacts, including improved mental health, reduced suicidality, improved body image, better social connections, enhanced quality of life, and a renewed sense of hope. Quantitative analyses comparing those who could access blockers (n = 115) to those who wanted but could not access them (n = 214) reinforced many findings, with statistically significant associations across multiple domains of wellbeing and positive youth development. Recommendations include the removal of any further restrictions on access to puberty blockers; a need for improved healthcare access for young people; and further research on intersectional experiences and barriers to access.

Dr John Fenaughty (he/him) is a queer cis pākehā (settler) lecturer at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland. John's research and activism focus on takatāpui and rainbow+ young people's health and wellbeing, with attention to equity and inclusion, especially in educational and health contexts. He teaches in the Graduate School of Social Practice in the Faculty of Arts and Education.

In my presentation, through a discussion of three YouTube vlogs by trans men, I will suggest that the seemingly simple division between men who have a penis (cis) and men who do not (trans) not only fails to reflect embodied realities of many trans men but is to a great extent discursively created and maintained.

Instead of defining trans men's bodies through a lack of "genital status reserved for cisgender men alone" (Keegan 2016), I consider the non-surgically altered trans penis as a form of body-reflexive practice of masculinity and thus a significant part of building one's trans male self.

My aim here is to critically bother the common cultural idea(l)s of what is, or what counts as, a penis, and in a wider sense to create a counternarrative to the cisnormative ways in which we see and understand male embodiment.

Luca Tainio is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research focuses on questions of transmasculinity, embodiment and knowledge-production. Currently Luca is also a part of two research projects; "Affective Activism: Sites of Queer and Trans World-Making" and "Trans*Creative: Health, Violence and Environment in Trans Cultural Production."