Transsexual Body Research Articles

Transsexual men and pregnancy: an integrative literature review.

Promoting sexual and reproductive health in the context of transmasculinity constitutes a new issue for health service organisation. This integrative review sought to understand the current evidence on pregnancy in transsexual men in the context of sexual and reproductive health care. From a search of the BVS, PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus, Capes, SciELO and PEPSIC databases, from 2010 to 2020, a sample of 11 articles was selected, treated by content analysis and grouped into four analytical categories: health services - positive experiences; cis heteronormative health services; implications of pregnancy for transsexual bodies; and repercussions of gender-affirming therapy and pregnancy. A cis heteronormative logic was found to predominate in health care, leading to negative experiences during antenatal care and childbirth among transsexual men. Their unique health needs during the pregnancy-puerperium cycle should include mental health care. It is suggested that strategies be adopted to build capacity in health professionals with a view to respectful, inclusive perinatal care for this population group, as well as further studies on the subject.

Restrição de políticas públicas de saúde: um desafio dos transexuais na atenção básica

Abstract Objective to identify and discuss the reasons that hinder or restrict transsexuals’ accessibility to primary health services. Method original research with a qualitative approach. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with transsexuals between December 2018 and March 2019. Bardin’s thematic content analysis was used. Results the following thematic categories emerged from data analysis: Low resolution and multiple barriers to access of transsexuals to primary health care; Non-inclusion and self-exclusion: the explicit non-belonging to the Unified Health System. Conclusion and implication for practice the non-recognition of transsexuals as citizens with the right to access health care, abjections by the transsexual body, prejudice and lack of value are factors that restrict this population to health system. This difficulty reverberates in an important challenge to be overcome by transsexuals in the search for qualified care. For practice, it is understood the importance of bringing to the center of discussions, in all spheres of health care, issues about values, principles and social morals that are intertwined in health professionals’ conduct and performance.

THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE TRANSEXUAL BODY IN CINEMATOGRAPHIC WORKS

Transsexuals are individuals who feel out of place in their own bodies, facing constant conflicts between identity and biology and still face barriers and social prejudices. The subjectivity approach present in transsexual bodies assumes relevance in the contemporary scenario to foster discussions of gender, prejudice and social inclusion, through the problem of dominance of the body. This article aims to identify the subjectivity present in the transsexual body presented in the cinematographic works Transamérica and The Danish Girl.

The transsexual body in psychological listening

The transsexual body in psychological listening

Performing Trans in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Gender Transitions in Islamic Law, Theatre, and Film

In the wake of a string of sensationalist documentaries about transsexuality in Iran, Iranian theatre and film artists began crafting groundbreaking trans performances to educate audiences and depict characters living non-heteronormative lives without the translating influence of queer theory or identity politics. Investigating transsexual bodies as assembled by jurists in Iranian Shiʿa jurisprudence and by artists on stage and screen reveals the ways in which the transsexual body is constructed in Islamic legal discourse and represented in narrative and bodily form in the public imaginary in Iran. Representations of transsexuality in theatre and film highlight the role of the arts as a vehicle for social change, communal recognition, and self-cognition. In particular, performances of female-to-male gender transitions in theatre and film have expanded the boundaries of how gender presentation is translated onto Iranian stages, into Tehran coffeehouses, and onto global screens. These trans performances usher Iranian spectators into new forms of viewership and artistic consumption in their attempt to creatively represent transsexual bodies and narratives to increase tolerance towards transsexuals; further, they have ignited a conversation among artists and activists about the assemblage of transsexual bodies in artistic productions and the most effective narrative and emotional forms of catharsis to inspire change.

‘I TRUST TRANSGENDER FEMALE MICROCELEBRITIES’: FROM BUILDING A NEW BODY TO BECOME AN INSPIRING IDOL

Much global attention is given to Bangkok as the “Mecca of transsexual body modification” (Aizura, 2010, p. 2) for both Thai and non-Thai transgender women. Clearly, it has garnered an international reputation as “being culturally tolerant of gender variance” (p. 16), in particular, for transgendered women or ladyboys. However, they are still considered marginalized in Thai society and are not well-accepted for many Thais. Since the rise of networked technology, some Thai transgender women have lived online, formed likeminded-groups, and shared support. This paper argues that their blogs serve as counter-publics for the unheard voices to be publicly visible. At the intersection of technology, identity and online participation literatures, this research extends microcelebrity literature and borrows second-wave feminist value, “personal is political” to examine transgender women beauty bloggers and their blogs and understand how (their) personal is political. For this project, I had in-depth interviews with seven transgender women beauty bloggers in Thailand, taken in 2-hour period each during December 2016 and February 2017. Findings show that, Thai transgender female beauty blogs serve as “social-conscience-style activis[t]” (Vromen, 2006) who build their own bodies, friend their fans (regardless of how many followers they have accumulated), and become inspiring idols. The blogs lend themselves to serve as informational and emotional support to their followers, especially transgendered followers. Bloggers enact micro-political actions to be seen online and empower the marginalized, thus, become a trustworthy source.

EXPERIENCIAS CARCELARIAS DE TRAVESTIS Y TRANSEXUALES FEMENINAS EN SANTIAGO DE CHILE / JAIL EXPERIENCES FROM FEMALE TRANSSEXUAL AND ‘TRAVESTIS’ IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

Este artículo tiene como objetivo comprender los elementos constitutivos de la experiencia carcelaria de mujeres transexuales y travestis en Santiago de Chile. Para ello se realizaron cinco entrevistas con personas que fueron encerradas en cárceles masculinas. Se puede argumentar que los cuerpos femeninos que vivenciaron la cárcel masculina desarrollaron experiencias específicas que envuelven estrategias de sobrevivencia y subyugación. Dentro de los resultados fueron encontrados los siguientes elementos centrales: primeramente se encuentra la constitución del cuerpo transexual femenino y travestis en relación a una trayectoria de vida precaria. Como segundo elemento se encuentra la constitución de experiencias carcelarias basadas en los relatos de las entrevistadas. De esta forma el artículo da respuesta al cuestionamiento central, de cómo se componen las experiencias carcelarias de mujeres transexuales y travestis en el espacio carcelario masculino de Santiago de Chile.

A Systematic Review of Patient-Reported Outcome Measures Following Transsexual Surgery

The aims of our study were to identify studies that evaluated patient satisfaction after transsexual surgery, analyze existing questionnaires, and summarize their development, psychometric properties, and content. A systematic review of the English-language literature was performed. Patient-reported outcome measures designed to assess patient satisfaction and quality of life following transsexual surgery were identified. Qualifying instruments were assessed for content and adherence to international guidelines for development and validation. From 796 articles, 19 studies had sufficient data and met the inclusion criteria. Included were a total of 2299 patients and 17 patient-reported outcome measures: 10 generic instruments that assessed quality of life, 4 specific for female genital or sexual satisfaction, 2 specific for transsexual body image or gender dysphoria, and 1 specific for plastic surgery. The questionnaires were analyzed by reviewers to assess the adherence to the rules of the US FDA and the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Medical Outcomes Trust. We identified 17 individual questionnaires that were included. All measures were limited by either their development, their validation, or their content. There is a need for a new self-assessment tool, which should include functional, psychorelational, and cosmetic components, to measure satisfaction and quality of life of patients who have undergone transsexual surgery. This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .

Bodies in motion: spaces, emotions and representations that (de)construct realities.

OBJECTIVE To analyze the social representations of the body among Brazilian and Costa Rican transsexual people through their life stories. METHOD Qualitative and descriptive multicenter research. The study population consisted of 70 participants. Two organizations cooperated to collect the information, one in Florianópolis, SC-Brazil and one in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Content Analysis was used to analyze the data. RESULTS Based on the results, a single social representation of corporeality was unveiled: "Modeled bodies: about the elasticity of corporeality". This representation described two clear elementary context units (discourse matrices). The first associates the body with an inconclusive, transitory, volatile, pliable, moldable and fluid object, while the second relates the body with a separate institution, but regulated and controlled by others. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the transsexual body is a volatile, transient, transformable institution, crossed by the marks of a historicizing and historicizable time, which comes within the scope not only of what can be named by means of linguistic signs, but also of what belongs to the unnamable in terms of sociocultural perceptions and feelings.

Transsexuality in Contemporary Iran: Legal and Social Misrecognition

Sex change surgery has been practised in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1982. Therefore, a medical and judicial process of transition has been regulated accordingly. However, this has not resulted in either the legalization of sex change surgery, nor in the recognition of transsexual identity within Iranian substantive law. Sex change surgery is allowed through Islamic law, rather than substantive law, in response to the existing social facts and norms, on the one hand, and structural cooperation with medical system, on the other. In this article, I argue that the Iranian heteronormative law’s understanding of transsexuality has amounted to the misrecognition of trans persons’ status within law and society. Using semi structured interviews, intersectional content analysis, and feminist methodologies, the findings indicate that transsexual bodies have gained meaning through religious and medical discourses within a framework of power relations, and that Iranian transsexual persons have reconstructed and redefined gender and gender relations in a way that informs their understanding of gender and sexuality beyond the existing Islamic legal and social norms. Moreover, intersectional analysis of the interviews demonstrates how the legal misrecognition of transsexuality creates space for a discourse which in itself leads to the misrecognition of other gendered identities, such as homosexuals and transwomen.

Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture

Contents: Introduction: the 'freak' body: nature versus culture? Part I Hyper-Muscular Bodies: Introduction: extreme bodybuilding 'Wow, Dude! 'You're a monster!' The politics of bigorexia Flex-rated! Hyper-muscular bodies: resistance or erotic spectacle? Part II Fat Bodies: Introduction: fat But it's only a fat suit! Representing 'fake' fat in popularculture 'Watch me grow!': fat admiration, stuffing and feederism. Part III Transsexed Bodies: Introduction: transexuality Finding the voice I want to use: femininity, gentility and TransAmerica Chicks with dicks and hunks with pussies: eroticising the pre-op transsexual body. Part IV Disabled Bodies: Introduction: disability There's something about 'crip' bodies: contemporary representations of disability in the films of the Farrelly brothers and Todd Solondz Becoming whole: amputees, devotees and self-demand amputation Conclusion: strategies of containment? Bibliography Filmography Index.

My Words to Victor Frankenstein. Above the Village of Chamounix - Performing Transgender Rage

I am not the * rst to link Frankenstein’s monster and the transsexual body. Mary Daly makes the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon,” in which she characterizes transsexuals as the agents of a “necrophilic invasion” of female space (69-72). Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly as a formative in= uence, is less direct when she says that “the problem of transsexuality would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence,” but in this statement she nevertheless echoes Victor Frankenstein’s feelings toward the monster: “Begone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust. You reproach me with your creation” (Raymond 178; Shelley 95). It is a commonplace of literary criticism to note that Frankenstein’s monster is his own dark, romantic double, the alien Other he constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself; indeed, Frankenstein calls the monster “my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave” (Shelley 74). Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond and others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem? (1)' e attribution of monstrosity remains a palpable characteristic of most lesbian and gay representations of transsexuality, displaying in unnerving detail the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural fascination with transgenderism. (2) Because transsexuality more than any other transgender practice or identity represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of * xed genders upon which a politics of personal identity depends, people who have invested their aspirations for social justice in identitarian movements say things about us out of sheer panic that, if said of other minorities, would see print only in the most hate-riddled, white supremacist, Christian fascist rags. To quote extensively from one letter to the editor of a popular San Francisco gay/lesbian periodical:Referring by name to one particular person, self-identi* ed as a transsexual lesbian, whom she had heard speak in a public forum at the San Francisco Women’s Building, the letter-writer went on to say:When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I * nd no more reason to mourn my opposition to them-or to the order they claim to represent-than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race. I do not fall from the grace of their company-I roar gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo-packing leatherdyke from hell.

Theorizing Transgender Embodiments

Gayle Salamon's Assuming Body is brilliant book that marks an important milestone in theorizing transgendered embodiments. Chapter 1 develops reading psychoanalytic concept ego, which Salamon finds of partic - ular use in thinking transgender because it shows that which one has 'felt sense' is not necessarily contiguous with physical as it is perceived from outside (14). She positions her reading bodily ego as correction to Jay Prosser's Second Skins, which uses that concept to locate materiality transsexual bodies as prediscursive. 1 Aligning most closely with Paul Schilder and Kaja Silverman, Salamon insists that the constituent parts cannot be thought as biologically given prior to their assemblage by schema, which serves as a mediating entity between self and world and renders accessible only through psychical mediation (30). In chapter 2, Salamon turns to Maurice Merleau- Ponty's phenomenology to argue that our lived experiences embodiment emerge through desire and proprioception in relational space between self and other. This is ground- breaking move, for it allows Salamon to account for embodiments across spec- trum transgendered identities, rather than follow Prosser in privileging trans- sexuality. Merleau- Ponty's distinction between body and proves useful for understanding moment in film Boys Don't Cry at which Lana Tisdell declares that she knows that Brandon Teena is man because she has seen him in full flesh (58). Here Lana recognizes defined not by body's material contours but by Brandon's felt experience male embodiment. Salamon's

Somatic and Geographical Bodies: Constructions of Gender and Nature in the 20th Century

This article examines the nexus between nature and culture, the real and the constructed, and between gender and body as exposed within queer theory and as exercised in performance and installation art. Moving from theories and artistic practices which engage the mechanical body to those of the transsexual body, this article essays to undo the double-binaries implicit within contemporary modalities for somatic identification.

Trans/Virtual: The Anxieties of Transsexual and Electronic Embodiments

The transsexual body, modified with medical technology, enters the realm of the unreal as it destabilizes notions of binary sex and gender. It can be, for many anxious viewers of it, a body in opposition to nature. Anxieties about the real versus the virtual also arise in relation to cyberspace. This paper, originally written as an oral PowerPoint presentation, explores the places where transgender physicality, cyberspace, and anxiety intersect, discussing the ways in which clinicians and clients can use virtual reality to expand beyond traditional notions of body and self, real and unreal.

Putting the ‘T’ into South African Human Rights: Transsexuality in the Post-Apartheid Order

Informed by narratives provided by self-identified South African transsexuals, whose lives span different periods of South Africa’s political and social history, this article seeks to explore how South Africa’s medical, legal and military establishments have exerted power over the transsexual body. A variety of studies outline the extent to which the apartheid state was a highly gendered state characterized by inflexible patriarchal norms and the dominance of violent and authoritarian forms of masculine expression. Hyper masculinization and militarization were explicit goals of the apartheid state. Deviance from the state’s prescribed gender norms was not simply socially unacceptable, it was, in many cases, punishable. South Africa’s post-1994 democratic Constitution, in contrast, explicitly outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But the democratic legal framework, which provides significant protections for freedom of sexual expression and freedom from discrimination for homosexuals has arguably had less of an impact on the lives of South Africa’s transsexual community. The state, even the post-apartheid state, has been loathe to move beyond the idea of a necessary correlation between the physical make-up of the body and the gender identity of a person in the way in which it has treated the idea of transsexualism.

“A New Hope”: The Psychic Life of Passing

In an examination of the psychological aspect of passing, this essay challenges Sandy Stone's conceptualization and subsequent request for transsexuals to forego the act. Employing an auto-ethnographical approach, this essay contends that considering the “psychic” dimensions of passing requires different, and more hopeful, articulations about transsexual bodies, such that gendered and racialized transsexual bodies are produced not simply in terms of social reading and physical embodiment, but also through psychic affirmation and disavowal.

Mapping Territories

Space is gendered. Not only is it constructed along a male/female binary (Duncan, 1996), it also emerges within a transgender dimension. Beyond the work of Nameste (2000) on space and who has the right to occupy it and Haberstam (2005) on space and the archive, there is a paucity of literature discussing transsexual space. Yet, learning to read this space is important, for it is within space that transsexual bodies are conscribed to the margins, erased in explosive passion, and allowed to become human (Butler, 2004). Although one can read space in different ways (Agnew, 2005), one does not choose a method to read it because it is true (Rose, 1999), but because it is useful. Therefore, desiring the possibility of deterritorializing lines of flight that disrupt the strata of heterosexual space, it is the purpose of this paper to examine how space, interpreted through the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), functions in the lives of male-to-female-transsexuals.

Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive

Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive

Changing Sex, Changing Self

This article explores how transsexual men and women talk about shifts in self-perceptions and embodiment. Often there are remarkable changes in transsexual people's fleshy physicality that affect not only how their gendered bodies are perceived but also how they experience themselves as embodied subjects. Yet despite the advances of medical science and a growing investment in new bodily technologies, the author argues that the transsexual body cannot be seen as entirely malleable, because it is often marked by previous physical features and cultural bodily practices that are difficult to shake off. This is particularly the case for male-to-female transsexuals, because the markers of masculinity appear harder to escape. Thus, in a move toward a theory of embodied subjectivity, the author argues that transitions in a sense of gendered subjectivity are intrinsically tied to and inseparable from shifts in gendered embodiment.