Práticas corporais e transexualidade: estudo de homens e mulheres trans

Abstract

Discussions about gender have been expanding and achieving consistency in the last years. Transsexuality, in a specific way, has been the subject of debates and production of studies inside and outside of the academic areas. Transgender people are recognized for seeking to transform their bodies according to their gender identity, the one that they feel they belong to. Physical activities can be considered as resources that help these transformations. In this sense, the objective of this study is to understand and analyze whether physical activities are resources used by transsexual people during the process of body changing to build a body, according to the characteristics of the gender they have identification. This research is characterized as a qualitative exploratory one and we adopted a phenomenological interpretive perspective to do this. The social beings of this research were eight trans men and ten trans women who were attended by the Total Health Care Ambulatory for Transvestites and Transsexuals, located in the annex of The Clementino Fraga Hospital in João Pessoa - PB. In order to have elements of analysis to this study, we used a semi-structured interview and a socioeconomic questionnaire to have an overview of the group interviewed. To analyze the speeches we got, we used the phenomenological analysis, proposed by Bicudo (2011), which seeks to emphasize the senses, to perform syntheses of units of meaning and to analyze the speeches through categories of analysis as well. The present investigation led to the construction of three original articles. The first one has as objective to analyze the relationship of trans men with physical activities in the process of "masculinization". The results showed us that the interviewees do physical activities searching for body mass gain and muscle definition, aspects that according the interviewees' point of view, refer to a masculine body, reinforcing not only their masculinity, but also helping them to build their sexual identity. The second article had as objective to discuss the relationship between forms of body shape, emphasizing physical activities adopted by transsexual women and the process of "achieving" the female body. The results indicate that the interviewees who practice physical activity are looking for the gain of body mass in the gluteal region and in the legs, and also the definition of the abdomen. Those who do not do physical activity, say that they are afraid of masculinizing the body and / or not attending fitness centers because of the prejudices they suffer. The third one analyzed the suffering of transsexual people during the practice of physical or sports activities. The results show that the peoples interviewees suffer or have already suffered some kind of discrimination in the spaces that offer physical activities and / or during physical activities, and in sports competitions as well. This kind of discrimination appears in this study as the reason, in many occasions, for abandoning these practices.