McGill University’s Hiring of Sahar Sadjadi
The McGill University Department of Social Science of Medicine’s hiring of Sahar Sadjadi, with consultation of members and students of the Anthropology department, strikes me as ill-conceived. At a time when we’re finally starting to shed light on the needs of trans youth and the importance of hiring trans faculty to teach those subjects sensitively, the department chose to hire someone whose work on the matter includes criticizing the use of puberty blockers among trans youth.
As recently as this year, she said: “Puberty, then, does not have to be imagined as an inevitable natural disaster ravaging the child’s body and body-brain integrity from within, to be averted at any cost.” Of course, puberty need not be a disaster for gender creative kids — not all of them want to transition — but her criticism of puberty blockers and of the view of gender identity as internally constituted seems at best irresponsible and at worst intentionally feeding into anti-trans sentiment. (I personally lean towards the former.) We’re far from even touching upon best practices such as critically reflecting on her role as a cis anthropologist working on trans youth.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, her work has been cited favourably by anti-trans and conservative outlets.
Conservative outlet Mercatornet reads: “Medical professionals such as Sahar Sadjadi, a physician and anthropologist, have expressed concerns regarding the growing use of puberty suppression treatments in children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.”
Another fan-favourite anti-trans outlet, 4thWaveNow cites her 2013 paper to drum up fears around puberty blockers and infertility.
When confronted about her uptake by anti-trans movements during the hiring process, she refused to answer, saying she didn’t want to talk about politics. Considering how irreducibly political trans youth care is, this worries me.
Also worrisome is her apparent disconnect from the world of trans advocacy and healthcare. Her work is ethnographic in nature yet doesn’t extensively engage with the rich literatures and knowledges produced by trans scholars and community organisations. Trans scholars are confined to “by the by, these people talk about this topic” notes and paragraph endings, in her latest article. I am told she also deflected when pressed on that point. Her acknowledgements sections are also noticeably short on trans people. Her apparent disconnect from trans and trans healthcare communities is also apparent from the anecdotal survey of Facebook mutuals. Whereas I tend to have ~50 mutuals with most people active in trans health and even 15 with people who have been repeatedly accused of engaging in conversion therapy and are considered persona non grata in many trans health circles, I only share a single mutual with her. Though none of this is determinative, it speaks to a pattern: how are we expecting someone to conduct high quality research on trans issues without meaningful connections to trans and trans health communities?
I highly question the wisdom of hiring someone, at the peak of political opposition to trans youth, who is cisgender, and who seems to be divested of meaningful connections with the studied community, critical of crucial care for transgender youth, and uninterested in accounting for the deeply political nature of her work.
What message is the hiring committee sending, especially when all the points I made were raised during the hiring process? Surely they could have found someone whose work wasn’t so fraught with risks, whose work was going to be deeply rooted in the communities being studied. (This needs not necessarily be trans youth: the department sorely needs rooted scholarship by academics of colour, especially Black and Indigenous ones.)
Why this choice?