On September 19, 2024, doctoral students from the Institute of Social Medicine (IMS) at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and collaborators from CLAM, Ana Luiza Morais and Luis Phillipe Nagem Lopes, participated in the Working Group “Transgender Issues” during the Student Week of the Graduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology.
Both presented their work titled “Trans Children in Dispute: Mapping Spaces, Discourses, and Actors that Deny Gender in Digital Environments,” which included initial reflections from research conducted by Professor Elaine Brandão and doctoral student Júlia Freire de Alencastro, researchers from the Institute of Collective Health Studies (IESC-UFRJ), with the participation of student Luis Phillipe. Broadly, the investigative effort focuses on the Full Childhood Movement, viewed through the theoretical and methodological lenses of social studies of science and queer theory. In dialogue with this exploratory investigation, the reflections presented in the GT also emerge from the problematizations of the doctoral research outlined by student Ana Luiza, who aims to address anti-gender and anti-trans offensives in their connections with the field of sexual rights from a decolonial perspective.
The working group, organized by Aoi Berriel (UFRJ) and Zett Ribeiro (UFRJ), served as an important space for discussions on how transgender issues have been underrepresented in academic settings, highlighting the importance of research agendas that focus on the lives, forms of resistance, and diverse processes of creativity and visibility of trans individuals in knowledge production spaces. This environment also fostered political alliances and opportunities to strengthen emotional and theoretical ties, sharing experiences, references, and affects related to the presented works.
Check out the summary of the work presented at the Student Week of PPGSA/UFRJ:
Moral panic surrounding the rights of trans individuals is not new, but it has been intensified by the rise of the far-right worldwide. In Brazil, a group self-identified as the “Full Childhood Movement” (MIP), composed of professionals from various sectors (health, education, security, justice, journalism, and liberal professions) as well as families, has claimed a space in discussions about gender, particularly regarding childhood. The MIP, through parliamentary fronts and representatives from medicine, has garnered significant political acts and disseminated information about the topic on its social media. Since June 2023, we have been ethnographically monitoring the MIP in digital spaces, analyzing how the group and its representatives have mobilized truth as a device through “scientific” and feminist arguments that deny the existence of trans children or reclassify them under mental health disorders. We discuss the “gender denialists,” who, according to Paul Preciado, obliterate voices, discourses, and actors in seemingly contradictory symbiotic relationships. We argue that denial constitutes itself through an anti-trans agenda, producing reverberations in the political and social reality. Therefore, in dialogue with queer and transfeminist theory, we discuss how “gender denialisms” intersect with identity politics and the functioning of the nation-state of neoliberal individualism.