Fé cega, faca amolada: reflexões acerca da assistência médico-cirúrgica à intersexualidade na cidade do Rio de Janeiro

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Anacely Guimarães
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/4276
• topic: Intersexuality; Gender; Sexuality; Intersexualidade; Gênero; Sexualidade; CNPQ::CIENCIAS DA SAUDE::SAUDE COLETIVA

This thesis meditates upon the medical care and surgical intervention in intersexual patients. The birth of intersex children is treated as a biological and social urgency and, as a consequence, surgical correction has been the forefront response to such cases. These types of interventions intend to fix anatomical anomalies in order to make an unequivocal correspondence between sex and gender. In this sense, surgical intervention thrives to achieve the hegemonic pattern of male and female sex assignment. However, this kind of solution is not consensual outside the biomedical field and numerous social groups, scientists, activists and justice operators rise up to question the normalization of genitals in intersexual adolescents and children. Taking into account those differences of opinions, this research focused on the arguments, be they biological or sociological, used to sustain the medical practice of surgical reparation of genitals considered to deviate from the male and female pattern. Nine health professionals that provide care to intersexual patients and their families in the city of Rio de Janeiro were interviewed. As another complementary strategy, the specialized literature up to date was assessed, particularly longitudinal studies regarding the consequences of surgical intervention. Henceforth, we analyze how the conceptions of gender and sexuality impact treatment of intersexual patients and how these same conceptions articulate with notions of health and care to justify corrective surgery. This approach to the medical practice also allowed us to perceive the way that medical care interacts with social vulnerabilities and other types of social markers, such as class and regional upbringing. Furthermore, the promise of restoring normality via surgical intervention is not reflected in the longitudinal studies which, by itself, are already scarce and also have inconsistent and imprecise indicators.