Gender in dispute: The Integrated Care Clinic for Trans People and the Debates for the Depathologization

• Grant number: 18/17227-1
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: April 01, 2019
• End date: March 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health
• Principal Investigator: Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira
• Grantee: Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Aparecido Francisco dos Reis ; Lucio Costa Girotto ; Thales de Almeida Nogueira Cervi

Abstract

This research aims to undertake an ethnography of events, movements and discussions relating to the Integrated Clinic for Trans* People at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). In examining the process of the Clinic's creation, we find a service consisting of healthcare professionals who act according to the demands of social movements, but who are also obligated to delimit themselves according to a vision that naturalizes gender (with "gender" understood here as a nosological category). Trans* people - who live and construct their gender identities outside of the binary and biologizing markers established as "normal" - also interpellate this service. This dispute regarding gender and sexuality also touches on attempts at constructing dialogues and bridges to communication, without which no forms of care can be constructed, and healthcare itself is at risk. This ethnography will therefore act as a sociogenesis of the Clinic, examining conflicts and controversies relating to depathologization and to subjacent conceptions of gender. It will also make possible a description of the search for the construction of dialogical relations between healthcare professionals and trans* people. (AU)