Developing gender: The medical treatment of transgender young people

Situating the contemporary medical treatment of transgender young people - children and adolescents - in the longer history of engagement between transgender activists and the medical community, this article analyzes the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) concerning the medical treatment of transgender young people. It traces how the SOC both achieves medical treatment for children and adolescents and reinforces a normative gender system by cleaving to a developmental approach. Without rejecting the value of developmentally-based medical treatment for now, it offers some preliminary thoughts on queer theory's valuation of developmental failure as a potential future alternative to an emergent medico-technological transgender normativity.