Gender pathologization and criminalization: The prison experience of transvestites

Abstract

The experience of being a transvestite is traversed by multiple regulations in the fields of law and medicine. Both fields of knowledge articulate and reaffirm a specific normative conception of gender that leads to the criminalization and pathologization of this experience. This situation reaches alarming levels, especially in the case of imprisoned transvestites. To illustrate the articulation between pathologization and criminalization, we use bibliographic research and the field report constructed by one of the authors of this essay. We aimed to show how this articulation occurs from the concrete case of a female transvestite subjected to medicalization within the prison system and how this procedure led to her (re)criminalization. That way, pathologization, and criminalization build an epistemological framework that sets the limits within which gender and sexuality become visible and bypass an understanding of the right to health.