We cordially invite you to a public lecture by PD Dr. Ketil Slagstad (Charité Berlin) 

Title: “Standardizing Sex: Trans Medicine, Activism, and the Scandinavian Welfare State”  

This DLS lecture traces efforts by social medicine and the state to standardize and regulate sex over the course of the twentieth century, alongside the ways trans people resisted pathologizing categories and worked within – and against – eugenic frameworks to claim rights and secure access to healthcare.

Ketil Slagstad is a physician-historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité Berlin. His research focuses on the production, negotiation, and contestation of medical knowledge between medical experts, patients, and activists in the history of trans medicine and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He is particularly interested in the role of bureaucracy in regulating medical practices, but also in how the welfare state context has shaped thought styles and practice in social medicine. His first book, Det ligger i blodet (Press, 2023), about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Norway, based on archive material and interviews, was awarded the Norwegian Critics' Prize for Best Non-Fiction 2023 and the Book Trade's Non-Fiction Prize 2023. Standardizing Sex, his second book, was published by The University of Chicago Press in September 2025. Currently, he is the PI of the research project Tools of Clinical Knowledge, a praxeographic analysis of clinical research and biological psychiatry in the 20th century. Slagstad has published his research in both history of science and medical journals (including Isis, Social History of Medicine, and New England Journal of Medicine). 

Information for DLS Lecture
Thursday, 19th November 2026
16:00–18:00
Location: room B1/B2 (Levi-Montalcini) at CBBM, ground floor, Campus Lübeck 

Online-attendance via Webex

Information for DLS Seminar
Friday, 20th November 2026
09:00–14:00 (presence)
Location: IMGWF Lecture Hall (Hörsaal) Königstr. 42, 23552 Lübeck

DLS Seminar Programme (preliminary)
9:45 – 10:00 Coffee & Check-In
10:00 – 10:15 Welcome, introduction
10:15 – 11:30 Group work
11:30 – 11:55 Break
11:55 – 12:00 Group picture
12:00 – 12:45 Open discussion
12:45 – 13:00 iRTG information
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch