Transsexuality in the health sciences’ scientific literature

Abstract

Introduction: The study discusses the visibility of scientific studies on transsexuality in the health field. Objetives: The study therefore questions how transsexuality is approached in the field at the present time, taking as the temporal margin the period 2014-2016. Methodology: The domain analysis, proposed by Birger Hjørland and Hanne Albrechtsen, was adopted, as a theoretical-methodological approach, for the recognition of the transgender social group as a discursive community. Data collection was performed at the LILACS database, managed by the Latin American Center for Health Sciences Information (BIREME), based on the descriptive data (focusing on the title of the articles) using the term(s) "transsexual(s)". Twenty-two documents were recovered in the period. From these, the following metadata, author, title, method and study population were used, descriptor, year of publication, being considered for the study, as central, the elements "method" and "subject” (detected from the descriptors). Results: After the corpus’ analysis, it was verified that the methods adopted to approach the theme are: narrative studies, reviews with qualitative and quantitative analyzes; observational studies; theoretical reviews; content analysis; comparative studies; discourse analysis; systematic reviews, among others cited throughout this study. Conclusions: The main thematic occurrences identified from the descriptors were: people, readjustment, gender, identity, hormones and health. Within the limits of the extension and horizontality of the data, it can be deduced from the results that the Health Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean still study transsexuality with a focus on the pathologization of the individuals, mainly from the representations manifested by the notions "readjustment" and "hormones".