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.