Good sex or true sex? Perspectives on gender governance

Abstract

The medicalization of behaviour not according to stereotyped binary notions of gender identity and sexuality produces a series of pathologizing categories, such as “gender dysphoria”, “transsexuality” or “transvestism” that function as protocols for the providing of care through the production of the ‘truth’ of gender and ‘sex’. After examining the institutionalisation and medicalization of gender identity during the last decade in Spain, in this paper I will consider the paradoxes of the appropriation of psychopathologies carried out by the movements for the de-pathologizing of transsexuality and transfeminists currents, as well as their impact in the drafting to the DSM-V. I will also explore methodological aspects of this research, such as splitting the study of sexuality from the study of gender defended by some proponents of queer theory. I will continue reflecting on a possible new interpretative framework that attends to the formation of the truth of ‘sex’ while opening new possibilities for the development of good sex.