Demand for Space: Elderly Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, Healthcare, and Theological Ethics.

Visibility for transgender and gender nonconforming people and the elderly is growing; however, thus far the overlap of the two groups has rarely been considered. Trans persons therefore remain largely invisible in the context of older people's care and medicine. The discrimination faced by this group is at least twofold: they are the targets of aggression incited by transphobia, and also by ageism. Although older trans and gender nonconforming people exist as a greatly marginalized group within another already marginalized group, even the field of theological ethics has neglected to grant them ethical attention. This leads to especially harsh consequences for elderly transgender and gender nonconforming people due to their specific vulnerabilities. There are reports from trans persons who have resolved never to make use of health services again due to regular experiences of transphobia in medical settings. There are religious components within transgender and gender nonconforming issues that should not be overlooked in this context. On the one hand, medical staff, in the name of their Christian beliefs, have refused to provide trans persons with basic medical care. On the other hand, demands for places of visibility, and spaces for the individual, are regularly made in trans-positive studies, and can be linked to discussions within theological ethics about giving space. Some ethical formulas within the Hebrew and Christian traditions focus on the creation of space in which other beings may exist, as found in concepts like brother-sisterhood, friendship, and Sabbath. By casting light on elderly trans and gender nonconforming people, and on their demands for space, via reflections on ethical concepts of space-making, this study develops a specific understanding of space for elderly trans persons. The paper aims to develop an understanding of trans-positive spaces within theological ethics and applied ethics. Spaces that assume a withdrawal or contraction by all those who have previously taken up trans spaces through ignorance, contempt, or violence, should not thereby become spaces of absence: indeed, elderly trans and gender nonconforming people might be in need of both kinds of spaces, those where otherness enables withdrawal, and those where the helping presence of others continues.

Phenomenology and its relevance to medical humanities: the example of Hermann Schmitz's theory of feelings as half-things.

One leitmotif that medical humanities shares with phenomenology and most contemporary medical ethics is emphasising the importance of appreciating the patient as a whole person and not merely as an object. With this also comes a focus on marginalisation and invisibility. However, it is not entirely clear what exactly patient-centred care means. What both phenomenology and medical humanities contribute to a 'more humane health-care encounter' (Goldenberg 2010, p 44) is offering not only a first-person perspective, but a dialogue between the third-person perspective and evidence-based medicine. Therefore, one main aim of medical humanities and phenomenology is to pay attention to the lived body (Leib) while adding this to the science of the objective body (Körper). In this study, I will discuss this connection through the lens of Hermann Schmitz's phenomenology. Finally, in light of this dialogue between phenomenology and medical humanities some proposals for medical practice shall be suggested.

"Living in a Shell of Something I'm Not": Transsexuality, Medical Ethics, and the Judeo-Christian Culture.

A surgeon participating in a 2008 congress on the topic of trans-identified people posed the question of whether doctors would have to defend themselves when "judgment day" comes for having employed surgical means to turn men into women or vice versa? What might be viewed as a certain level of (medical) irrationality surrounding transgender life, coupled with widely documented cases of violence directed at these groups may well partly be attributable to the deeply internalized doctrine of creation in Judeo-Christian culture. Objections, however, to the use of transgender medicine "in the name of normalization" cannot relate to the biblical tradition, for there is no normative concept of gender and no text whose scope is to articulate theory of gender. In the vast expanse and freedom of the Judeo-Christian creator there is space for diversity, variations, and, above all, for the development of individual freedom.