Social support networks for trans people: expanding the production of care

Abstract

The rights of transgender people to health care has been achieved through intense social mobilization,  resulting in specific policies for that population. But  despite those policies, in general, there is a lack of assistance to this group regarding their health care,  leading them to design different therapeutic  itineraries in the search for health care assistance. In  this article, we present the therapeutic itineraries built  by the trans population in Niterói through their Social  Networks. For that, a qualitative exploratory research  was carried out at Ambulatório de Atenção à Saúde  João W. Nery, in Niterói. Twenty transgender people  who are cared for at the clinic and who live in the city  participated. They answered a semi-structured  interview script. Data treatment was carried out using  the thematic-categorical content analysis. The  research shows that Social Networks have expanded  the capacity of health production, mobilizing family  relationships, friendship, religiosity, student  movement, and study groups at the university, in  addition to the LGBTQIA+ social movement on the  empowerment and resignification of life projects and  the very expression of transgender identity. We  suggest that health services need to know and  articulate social networks to produce health care guided by the paradigms of integrality and human  rights.