Anna Kirkland

Anna Kirkland is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. She received her law degree (2001) and Ph.D in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (2003) from the University of California, Berkeley. She holds courtesy appointments with the Law School, Sociology, Political Science, and Health Management and Policy at Michigan. Prof. Kirkland is a member of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation and served as a committee member on the National Academies panel charged with studying sexual harassment in the STEM fields of academia. From 2017 to 2022 she directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, a unit of the UM Office of Research.

Prof. Kirkland’s third book, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients, is recently published by the University of California Press. It is available in paperpack and free open access on the UC Press Luminos platform. Discrimination law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the U.S. But using civil rights law in healthcare settings is difficult because our healthcare system is complex, fragmented, and tuned to other priorities. The troubles with civil rights in health care reveal deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments. Prof. Kirkland explains what health care civil rights are, how they are supposed to work to protect against discrimination based on gender identity, how they work in practice at all levels, and how to strengthen them. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and open access was made possible by a TOME publishing grant (UM Library, LSA, and OVPR).

Prof. Kirkland’s latest research (co-PI with Dr. Jim Dupree, Michigan Medicine Urology) is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to study how insurance benefit designs for IVF influence the decisions patients make during IVF and the outcomes of their IVF attempts.

Prof. Kirkland is a co-editor with stef shuster and Carla Pfeffer of the Social Science and Medicine Special Issue “Unequal Care: Trans Medicine and Health in Dangerous Times” (October 2024). She is the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008) and Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (New York University Press, 2016), co-editor with Jonathan Metzl of Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010), and co-editor with with Prof. Marie-Andree Jacob at the University of Leeds, UK of a Research Handbook on Sociolegal Studies of Medicine and Health (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020).

She collaborates with Professor Gary Harper (School of Public Health) on a training grant that created Student Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research (SOAR) and serves as PI for “Pregnancy and Postpartum Support Programs for Women in Prison: Maternal and Neonatal Outcomes,” an NIH subaward with the University of Minnesota.

Prof. Kirkland teaches courses on health discrimination at the law school and gender and the law and health policy in Women's and Gender Studies.

Selected Publications (ORCID 0000-0001-5711-4074):

Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients (University of California Press, 2025)

Perspective—“Physicians as Political Pawns — The Texas Directive on Gender-Affirming Care and Other Moves,” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 386, No. 16 (April 20, 2022) doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2203746

"Health Insurance Rights and Access to Health Care for Trans People: The Social Construction of Medical Necessity,” with Shauhin Talesh and Angela Perone (December 2021). Online ahead of print: DOI: 10.1111/lasr.12575.

“Dropdown Rights: Categorizing Transgender Discrimination in Healthcare Technologies,” Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 289 (November 2021). Online ahead of print: doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114348

“Civil Rights as Patient Experience: How Healthcare Organizations Handle Discrimination Complaints,” with Mikell Hyman, Law and Society Review, Vol. 55 No. 2 (2021): 273-275. doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12554

Perspective, “Health Coverage and Care for Transgender People — Threats and Opportunities,” with Daphna Stroumsa, New England Journal of Medicine, December 12, 2020. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2032453

Transition Coverage and Clarity in Self-Insured Corporate Health Insurance Benefit Plans, with Shauhin Talesh and Angela Perone (open access in Transgender Health, September 2020, DOI: 10.1089/trgh.2020.0067)

Opinion: Use science to stop sexual harassment in higher education, with Kathryn B. H. Clancy and Lilia M. Cortina in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences September 2020, 117 (37) 22614-22618; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2016164117

Research Handbook on Sociolegal Studies of Medicine and Health with co-editor Marie-Andrée Jacob (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020).

National Academies Panel Member and co-author, Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies Press, June 2018)

Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury (New York University Press, 2016)

Co-editor with Jonathan Metzl, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010) 

Fat Rights:  Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008)

Fields of Study:

• law and society
• law and politics of health
• antidiscrimination law
• health insurance law and policy
• gender and sexuality in contemporary U.S. law
• rights claiming in organizational cultures