Transexuality: Body, subjectivity and collective health

Abstract

The article discusses health assistance given to transexual patients at public hospitals, based on in-house research carried out at the Hospital Universitário Clementino Fraga Filho of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (HUCFF/UFRJ), where these patients seek medical assistance with the purpose of having transgenital surgery performed. Observations demonstrate that transexuality is characterized by a condition of severe suffering. This is an experience that comes from the individual's awareness of not pertaining to its biological gender, but, above all, by the social unsafeness that comes from society not accepting this condition due to current cultural norms. Beyond the boundaries of the more singular and subjective issues, this situation reveals, in profound detail, the insufficiency of our sexual categorization, and illustrates how the categorization system of sex and gender utilized by specialists is based on exclusion. Hence it is argued that even within the context, the diagnosis of gender identification disorder permitting the access to public treatment, one ought not to cease questioning the effects of this normalization.