Entre genre et santé : les espaces des transidentités

At the intersection of gender, space, and health issues, are ‘trans studies’. For a long time, the question of trans-identities have been contained in spaces which are, at the same time, on stage (the cabaret, the night’s world), coded obscene (prostitution, physical transformations) or related to psychiatrisation, pathologisation… The world has limited its spaces of interactions with trans people into what are often ‘suffocated’ spheres: the surgery block and some disgracing press coverage. With the trans movement, as a structured and politicized social movement, the visibility of transidentities has increased. Trans associations, as well as the news media, have established a new polity of visibility, that is more complex and less pathologized. The geography of transidentities gradually leaves the secret of doctor’s offices to conquer more supports (on screens), legal and public interfaces. In France nevertheless, research around the spaces of transidentities is still limited. Trans studies, themselves are new in the French academic field (Espineira, 2008) and sometimes have difficulty being heard (Espineira, 2013). As such, the attempts to create LGBT geographies remain mainly focused on a “gays” analysis (Jaurand, 2005; Leroy, 2005, 2009; Raibaud, 2013) or “lesbian” research (Clerval and Cattan, 2011; Amari, 2013). International litterature is, more plentiful (Doan, 2007). Now, trans courses disrupts the supposed neutrality of space and highlight its stressful size, in particular when the gender expression does not return to sex assignment at birth.… The trans testimonies in particular, insist frequently on the spaces of intimity which are rare and precious and submitted to multiple controls by the parents, by relatives or by doctors, bruising privacy. At another scale, spaces of health and media spaces are good markers of the tensions which mark out the trans lifecourses. With consideration given to this context, the first part of this article examines the literature dealing with the space and the transidentities. Then in a second part the purpose is to examine the way the trans people are involved in more or less stressful spaces, more or less visible spaces also, and the way women’s and homosexual movements helped them to build an interface for dissident gender expression. It will be necessary, also, to underline that the geography of transidentites creates favorable maps to analyse the neutral or impersonal reading of the space and inaugurates a particular reading of the space and the interactions which take place there. A geography of transidentities shows, in hollow, a geography of the “cisgender privilege” to resume the expression of Julia Serano (2007). From this point of view, this article appears as a sketch for one social geography of transidentities and the progressive implementation of trans studies in the French university landscape.