“The law is not going to tell us how to care for the patient.” – Health Professionals and the Argentine Gender Identity Act

FARJI NEER, ANAHÍ

Trans Health International Perspectives on Care for Trans Communities

Transcript

Año: 2022; p. 27 - 42

This paper deals with the reception of the Gender Identity Law by health professionals in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It investigates the criteria that were adopted by health professionals after the approval of the Law to evaluate the admission and results of surgical interventions and hormonal treatments requested by the trans population. Between 2014 and2019, during my doctoral and later my postdoctoral research, I conducted a total of fifteen interviews with health professionals working in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area with experience in gender affirming treatments requested by the trans population. They included professionals from the specialties of mental health, endocrinology, plastic surgery, urological surgery, gynecology, phono audiology and medical clinics. In the interviews, participants were asked about their professional careers, how the Law on Gender Identity had changed the organization of care, and their perceptions of the depathologizing paradigm embodied in the Law. Each interview lasted approximately forty-five minutes and was conducted after the signing of an informed consent form. Interviews were recorded, loaded into software for the analysis of qualitative data and encoded based on the analysis dimensions indicated.In this paper, I analyze the interviews of four professionals of thE specialty of endocrinology, two of mental health, two of urological surgery and two of plastic surgery.