This book utilizes collaborative autoethnography to examine transformations in health and aging among queer, trans, and intersex people in society. To this end, the authors each utilize their lived experiences as queer, trans, and/or intersex people to discuss inequalities and norms in U.S. healthcare. Further, they elaborate upon some ways U.S. healthcare systems may become more inclusive of queer, trans, and intersex populations over time. In so doing, they utilize the autoethnographic cases to illustrate and describe the complexities of sex, gender, and sexualities in health and aging as well as the ways such intricacies facilitate societal inequalities in health and aging.

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Authors Nowakowski, Sumerau, and Lampe use autoethnography to illuminate the lived experience, health, and aging of queer, trans, and intersex individuals by detailing their challenges to seeking health care and navigating life and love. One chapter asks what sexuality means for one with cystic fibrosis (CF) and focuses on navigating safe sex and health care. Challenges include the stigma of chronic illness, the myth that aging involves losing sexuality, and the desexualization of disability. That chapter details how society may view someone with CF as "gross" and as hypervigilant to prevent genital and urinary infections during sex. A broader exploration of sexuality across life for previously desexualized groups is also needed. The second author highlights the impact of socioeconomic status and race on health care and the need for new models of health in the context of chronic illness, sexuality, or injury. She explores the life transformations of being assigned male at birth and using off-market female hormones, and painfully recalls being punished for referring to herself as female. The third author describes how learning of their intersex traits in young adulthood ushered the exploration of non-binary life. This is essential reading for health-care professionals and students of sexuality. Essential. All levels.