Temporal effects: how cisheteronormativity and reproductive injustice engender preventing, postponing, and becoming in trans* biographies

Holly Patch; Manuel Bolz; Mona Motakef; Sabine Wöhlke

doi:10.17169/ogj.2026.341

Authors

Holly Patch Dortmund University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4107-931X
Manuel Bolz Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Mona Motakef Dortmund University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8542-8537
Sabine Wöhlke HAW Hamburg https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7679-085X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2026.341

Keywords:

Discrimination, Everyday Life, Reproductive Justice, Time, Trans

Abstract

This article examines how cisheteronormativity and reproductive injustices shape trans* people’s life-course timing, reproductive autonomy, and self-determination in healthcare and legal systems. Despite reforms like Germany’s Self-Determination Act, significant barriers to reproductive rights remain. In this article, we extend the reproductive justice framework to include epistemic injustice and draw upon our secondary analysis of narrative interviews from three qualitative studies of trans* lives. Our findings show that the institutionalized cisheteronormative life course marginalizes trans* individuals, constraining their access to medical care, parenthood, and gendered becoming. They face testimonial and hermeneutical injustices and often live asynchronously to normative timelines. Achieving reproductive justice thus requires dismantling cisnormative assumptions and building inclusive systems that support diverse temporalities, non-linear life paths, and kinship networks.

Author Biographies

Holly Patch, Dortmund University

Holly Patch, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate at the Professorship of Sociology of Gender Relations at the Institute of Sociology, TU Dortmund University. Her research and teaching focus on gender studies, voice and singing, agricultural sociology, socio-ecological transformation, biographical research, and qualitative methods. In 2025, she was inducted into the TU Dortmund Young Academy. She received the Bielefeld Equality Award in 2023 for her doctoral dissertation “Claim Your Voice: An Ethnographic Study of Trans* Vocality.”

Manuel Bolz, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Manuel Bolz, M.A., is a cultural anthropologist. He conducts research and teaches in Göttingen and Hamburg. His research interests include ethnography and historical anthropology, urban studies, security and crime studies, political and legal anthropology, health, the body and emotions, and gender studies. He is also committed to public anthropology, i.e., a critical cultural anthropology that helps shape society. He worked in the collaborative project TRANS*KIDS.

Mona Motakef, Dortmund University

Mona Motakef is Professor of Sociology of Gender Relations at TU Dortmund, spokesperson for the Woman and Gender Studies Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS), co-editor of Feministische Studien, and head of the HBS-doctoral program “New Challenges in Ageing Societies.” Her research and teaching focus on gender studies, family and parenthood, couple and intimate relationships, the precarization of work and qualitative methods. Together with C. Wimbauer and A. Peukert, she led the DFG-funded project “Ambivalent recognition order? Doing reproduction and doing family beyond the heterosexual ‘nuclear family’” (MO 3194/2-1, PE 2612/2-1, WI 2142/7-1).

Sabine Wöhlke, HAW Hamburg

Sabine Wöhlke is Professor of Health Sciences and Ethics in the Faculty of Health at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg). She is the speaker of the Commission for Medical Anthropology (DGEKW), chair of the HAW Hamburg Ethics Committee, and vice-chair of the Ethics Committee for the Nursing Professions. Her research focuses on ethical issues in personalized medicine in close connection with clinical practice, as well as on the systematic, theoretical, and practical analysis of ethical issues related to health professions, forms of public participation in ethical aspects of medicine, nursing, and healthcare, and new technologies and digitalization in healthcare.

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Temporal effects: how cisheteronormativity and reproductive injustice engender preventing, postponing, and becoming in trans* biographies

Authors

DOI:

Keywords:

Abstract