Meanings of trans, transvestite, transexual and transgender in school, in the news and in the psychological office

Abstract

The human being is a symbolic being, the way in which his relationship occurs with reality is inevitably mediated by language. Therefore, the senses that function in society are related to the way people see and act in the world. The mediation of language occurs in such a way that we constitute ourselves as subjects based on the way we are called or named. It turns out that appointment can also be a form of insult and some subjects are constituted as subordinates to others, so society begins to treat these people in a hostile way. A social group that is constantly the victim of violence is the trans community, with Brazil being the country that kills the most trans woman and travestis in the world (ANTRA, 2022). In addition to physical violence, trans people experience school dropout, lack of access to the formal job market and health, we understand that the behavior of the Brazilian population is violent towards people from this social group. Understanding that the way a certain social group means in language can cause a population to be hostile, our work aims to analyze the meaning of the expressions trans, transgender, transsexual and travesti in informative texts of great relevance for the construction of opinion popular. To carry out the analyses, we mobilized assumptions from the Semântica Histórica da Enunciação, proposed by professor Eduardo Guimarães (2002, 2005, 2009, 2018) who understands that meanings are constituted in the event of language. We observed the enunciative procedures of reescrituração and articulação, which concern the enunciative relationships established between words in a text, as well as observing the relationships of argumentation and the cena enunciativa, in which we were able to observe the social places in which speakers are acted upon when saying. Therefore, we ask: what are the meanings of trans, transsexual, transgender and transvestite in informative and relevant texts for the Brazilian population? Who is socially authorized to define what trans, transsexual, transgender and transvestite people are? Does the violence that this social group is a victim of materialize the meanings that circulate in society? Therefore, the hypothesis of our work is: meanings that relate to the violence that these people suffer will be found in the designation of the words “Trans, Transsexual, Transgender and Travesti”. The research corpus was constructed with media texts, new high school materials, as well as guidance and diagnostic works used by psychiatry and psychology. The results point to meanings of trans, transgender, transsexual and travesti related to pathologies, gender stereotypes, fetishes, rejection of one's own body, among others. We also observe that the meanings compose the real to such an extent that the meanings of trans, travesti, transsexual and transgender that function in these excerpts also materialize in the aggressions that trans women and transvestites suffer. We also observed that in some excerpts, these expressions are avoided so that only the words LGBT and their variations are used, which establishes senses of isonomy between the trans community and other cisgender bodies. Finally, we observed that in most enunciative scenes we have a speaker acting in the social position of cisgender, authorized to say what trans people are. We understand that being cisgender or transgender is also related to the social places in which we are represented, meaning that semantics appears as an area that can contribute to gender studies.