Identidade de gênero e bem-estar: fatores internos, externos e culturais

Abstract

Transgender individuals, when compared to cisgender ones, have worse psychological well-being because they show low scores in social support and family bonding dimensions, therefore, health care attention should to be given not only to formal methods of gender adequacy, but also to internal, external and cultural factors impacting the transgender population, since gender identity construction is a multifactorial process that takes time and must occur uninterruptedly. The objective of this work is to assess transgender people’s well-being, investigating the relationship between gender identity and psychosomatics, observing how trans subjects, inserted in their family environment and sociocultural context, understand and feel their own body, in relation to the other, and what their demands and conflicts are. As method, a qualitative analysis of the discourse, in a total of 34 open individual interviews, carried out with 11 transgender subjects and a non-binary one, recruited by snowballing, is used. The conclusion is that external family factors, especially the motherly figure, have a crucial impact both on the transition process and on the well-being of the transgender person. In addition, multifactorial aspects, such as the detransition phenomenon, and the very depathologization of transgender existence should be better understood in adult population in order to optimize health teams’ performance when assisting that social group.