Transexuality and Social Policy: Current Directions and Social Emancipation in Portugal

Ricardo Ferreira de Almeida, Nídia Menezes, Ana Branca Carvalho, Joana Brinca

(1. Lamego School of Technology and Management, Polythecnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal;

2. Coimbra University, Portugal)

Abstract: The phenomenon of sex or change is a subsidiary of claims made by groups involved in the process: on the one hand medical knowledge, represented by psychiatrists, endocrinologists, surgeons, among other actors with close scientific ties, and on the other, homosexual rights activists, transsexuals and bisexuals. Among them subtle differences persist and a set of problems intrinsic to gender demarcation persist: the transsexual, one who seeks to make transmutations of bodily symbols manifested in a specific corporality, associated with particular habitus and the emission of carnal communications, is stripped of a culture of vision and division. In this sense, the transsexual question must be analyzed with attention, to correctly weigh social and citizen rights. Using the same formulas to perceive different problems is an error of methodological, ethnocentric, and naturalizing approximation. In this sense, and considering that transsexuals seem to be unprotected against a gay culture, credited in public action and in the meantime depatologized, and in the face of medical knowledge, which insists on the perspective that transsexuality is a pathology measurable in clinical and medical terms and shows fearful of moving forward to a sex-change operation whose error could be dramatic within the national health system, this paper aims to describe the Portuguese set of social policies directed to this group.

Key words: social policy, transsexualism, health care, sociology, social work