Ways of life, experiences, and confrontations of transgender people: considerations for professional action in social occupational therapy

Abstract

This article stems from a doctoral dissertation whose main objective was to understand how transgender people build strategies to cope with conditions of marginalization throughout their life histories. To this end, the oral history of life was employed as a data collection methodology; ethnographic tools, such as observation, were also used. The data were organized from the concept of ways of life in the light of Isabel Guerra’s perspective and arranged in three central axes: the system and social actors; history and everyday life; the objective and the subjective in the perception of reality. In addition, the analyses were carried out from an intersectional perspective, and the results indicated that the impositions of the sex-gender-desire system operate from the first stages of life, in a mechanism that connects various actors and social institutions, as well as access to concrete conditions of life operationalization. How these impositions and limits are perceived mediates the main coping strategies, which include the reconfiguration of the support network and the struggle for recognition, which, in the case of the interlocutors in the aforementioned research, occurred through education and the social movement spaces. The analysis supported by the concept of ways of life offered a powerful lens to identify this population’s demands, and it is a theoretical-methodological possibility for social occupational therapy practice.