“Tuck the girldick and bind the breasts:” intelligibility, work, and health in the experiences of university trans people

Abstract

Transgender people are exposed to different situations of vulnerability that intersect, having negative impacts on the health-illness-care process. To better understand this issue, we sought to know the experiences of seven transgender undergraduates at a public university in Minas Gerais, from semi-structured interviews. The narratives were analyzed on the perspective of content analysis, and the final categories juxtaposed with studies of social sciences and public health. In general, the narratives are different from those which account for most of the research on the theme in Brazil, especially regarding maintaining family bonds and the access to public universities. Hence, we formulated the hypothesis that the interaction between these elements and other markers of differences can positively contribute to establishing alliances and strategies to deal with the regime of gender identity intelligibility and the constraints of access to education, work, and health. Understanding these dynamics and their limitations, under the perspective in which the individual and the collective are intertwined, enabled us to highlight the role of (hetero)normativity in the segregation processes of transgender people, as well as reflecting on the political actions that might effectively transform this social reality.