The social context and the psychotherapeutic understanding of transsexuality

Abstract

transsexuality has occupied different scenarios within psychological theories. Different treatments and theories had emerged in clinical approaches raising the question about what psychotherapists think about transsexuals regarding their professional field. This article presents some findings of a research conducted in Venezuela, whose objective was to understand the meaning of transsexuality for psychotherapists, highlighting their opinions about depathologization, their experience in treatment and the implications this may have for themselves. During the investigation, the relevance of the social context —which will be discussed in this paper—as a mediator for the psychotherapeutic understanding of this condition proved to play an important role. Concepts such as gender, pathologization, and depathologization were located as key elements within the discussion. In-depth interviews were carried out to a sample of psychotherapists and subsequently were analyzed through constant comparative method under a ‘constructionist’ paradigm. Among the relevant conclusions, we found the rigidity of the dichotomic concept of gender as a barrier for welcoming sexual diversity, the stigmatization as the main problem for the depathologization, and the relevance of ‘the different’ as pathologizing criterion.vance of «the different» as pathologizing criterion.

Keywords

• transsexuality
• psychotherapists
• gender
• pathologization
• depathologization