Adolescente demais para ser travesti ou travesti demais para ser acolhida? : acolhimento institucional de jovens trans no município de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

Brazil's Statute of the Child and the Adolescent can be considered an advance when compared to the legal system of the Minors’ Code. However, the institutional sheltering of transvestite and transsexual girls continues to be an imbroglio for the Rights Guarantee System (SGD). Sometimes they are too “adolescents” to be transvestites, being denied the right to recognition and respect for gender identity. Other times, they are too transvestites to be “adolescents” and institutional care does not find a way to provide full protection. This research seeks to understand how sheltering of young transgenders is enacted in the city of Belo Horizonte. On that account, praxiography is chosen as the research’s methodology. It is argued, therefore, that the reception centre of trans girls approaches a device. It is constituted in a heterogeneous set of practices that comprise elements that are physical, human, non-human, discursive, legal, etc. Once activated, this device produces continuous, unpredictable and contingent effects. The banal and institutional practices are articulated, reconfigured and, in this way, enact – partially, locally and contingently – the object itself. With this, the institutional care is configured through the elements that it proposes to manage: protection, vulnerability, social and personal risk, “adolescences”, youth, autonomy, guardianship. The practices, researched here, are crossed by other elements: transvestite and transsexual experiences. Thus, it was observed that the institutional sheltering of young transvestites and transsexuals in Belo Horizonte is performed by systems, gears and flows prescribed by the legal system and technical norms that constitute the SGD. In addition, the capital of Minas Gerais has peculiar gears to deal with trans experiences and to provide shelter and protection. The research discusses how familist and minorist technologies are articulated in an optical machine for analysis and intervention in the lives of young trans women who access the SGD in Belo Horizonte. Finally, the paper presents how the acts of exchange, transfer and evasion are constituted as performative mechanisms for the reception of transvestite and transsexual girls in the capital of Minas Gerais. The research is an invitation to reflect on the ways in which the policy for the care of children and adolescents can be conceived and implemented in other ways.