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Contemporary transgender youth in the U.S. today face increasing stigmatization as extraordinary legislative attacks intensify discrimination and exclusion of these young people in healthcare, recreation, and school life. These attacks reflect broader political, religious, and cultural ideologies embedded in systems of power that regulate the provision of healthcare for American transgender youth. We apply Foucauldian discourse analysis and a theory-driven conceptual framework for structural analysis of transgender health inequities—Intersectionality Research for Transgender Health Justice—to identify discourses youth encounter within healthcare practice. We analyzed data from interviews conducted in Western Washington State with youth ages 13–17 ( n =11) and asked how transgender subjectivity was constructed in their accounts and in what ways youth made use of the discursive resources available to them when navigating systems of care. Three sets of discourses—discourses of normativity, discourses of temporality, and discourse of access—characterized participants’ narratives. We discuss how participants negotiated discursively situated systems of power in order to ensure their safety and access to care.
Shook et al. (Mon,) studied this question.