A emergência da categoria da transexualidade na interseção com as técnicas biomédicas.

Abstract

Reflecting on the emergence of the category of transsexuality as we know it today and its social, political and subjective consequences, particularly from the second half of the twentieth century, we tried in this dissertation to discuss the context that enabled the phenomenon of technological medicalization of this category. By developing it, this research presents physicians and activists actors who established a negotiation process between the demand of transsexual individuals and biomedicine s technical, legal and discursive possibilities. Initially, we sought to understand how medical professionals, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, belonging to the science of sexology from the late nineteenth century, included in their discourses and practices sexual behaviors considered deviant at the time. Homosexuality and transvestism, representatives of these "perversions", were diagnostic and identity categories of fundamental importance for the inauguration of transsexuality as a medical and psychiatric nosological category and as a "human kind", in other words, a subjective form of gender experience and identity. Therefore, and considering the socio-cultural context and the hormonal and surgical biotechnological development at the time, we have the hypothesis that the creation of this category was only possible due to the embodiment in transgender individuals of technoscientific procedures that enabled the se anatomic and biological transformations to build the desired gender. The medicalization of transsexuality and its medical-legal regulation, while they are vectors of pathologization and stigma, allowed access to these body changes. This research discusses the access to these technologies, subject to obtaining the psychiatric diagnosis, and addresses the interactive relationship between the discursive and practical aspects of the medical category and transsexual activists and individuals, as well as its effects that illuminate this issue. Finally, in order to illustrate and understand the interaction between technology and the transsexual body, we describe and briefly discuss the main procedures applied in transsexual men and transsexual women in gender transition.