Mia Florin-Sefton // On December 1st 2020, three High court judges in the UK effectively ruled that trans persons under the age of 18 will likely need a court order in order to gain access to puberty blockers in England and Wales. This highly publicized judgement was the result of a legal complaint first lodged…
Author: miacecily17
A Question of Inheritance: Lessons taken from George Schuyler’s “Black No More”
by Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton // George Schuyler’s biting and speculative satire Black No More (1931) ends with the slippery swindler and medical professional, Dr Julius Crookman, looking at a family photograph and commenting: “one happy crowd of Americans . . . all of them as dusky as little Mathew Crookman Fisher” (179). It is a…
The Deaf Crusaders: A Risky Prophecy
Mia Florin-Sefton // In March 2008, The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) hosted a talk titled “A Spotlight on Deafness” [1]. The talk was one in a long series dedicated to discussing various conditions thought to be potentially treatable with the development of new embryonic stem cell therapies (ESC). It is noteworthy, however, that…
#WC4BL: No More White Coats?
Mia Florin-Sefton // In the Fall of 2014, medical students and medical faculty across the US staged “white coat die-ins’ as part of, and in solidarity with, the Black Lives Matter movement. Almost instantaneously, images began to circulate online, as thousands of future medical professionals, future healthcare providers, and their teachers put on…
Unlearning Eugenics: (Un)Forgetting Genetics
Mia Florin-Sefton // What’s cool about us/ we take our time/ we do it slow. These lines, taken from Eileen Myles’ poem Epic for You, bookend the concluding chapter of Dagmar Herzog’s new book: Unlearning Eugenics. What — one might very well ask — does this provocative and poetic evocation of sexual longing, lingering intimacy,…
On Regeneration: The Once and Future Embryo
Mia Florin-Sefton // I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing . . . we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender – Donna Haraway…