31st annual Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies

Join us for the 31st annual Coley Lecture, the longest-running university LGBTQ+ lecture series in the country! This year we welcome stef shuster, who will give a talk on "Trans Eugenics: Social and Reproductive Control over Transgender People."

While many histories have been written about the scientific and medical communities’ complicity in propagating eugenics and coercive sterilization against a broad swath of people, how transgender people figure into these historical legacies has not been adequately addressed. Drawing on archives from the Kinsey Institute and Digital Transgender Archive, this talk will examine the various mechanisms that healthcare professionals used to gain social and reproductive control over transgender people in the mid-20th century, and how trans people responded to such efforts to undermine their autonomy, bodies, and lives.

stef shuster is an associate professor in Lyman Briggs College and Sociology at Michigan State University. Their current research in gender, medicine, and feminist science and technology studies considers how evidence is constructed, mobilized, and weaponized, which is the subject of their book, Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press, 2021).