The research moves from a postmodern paradigm and from the theoretical perspectives of Symbolic Interactionism (Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969) and of Social Constructionism (Gergen, 1985; Berger e Luckmann, 1966).
According to this theoretical framework, the different aspects related to identities and gender are considered plural and mutable processes of construction, historically and culturally situated and interconnected to the dimensions of the discourse and narratives, of doing and of the performance in every context of daily life (West e Zimmerman, 1987; Denzin, 2003; Salvini, 2011).
There are three main objectives of the research and they concern the analysis of the discursive processes of construction of the identity related to the biographies and the narratives of gender transitions; the analysis of the discursive processes connected to the mental health professionals’ practices related to gender transitions, the diagnostic process and the psychological services, as well as possible attributions of sense on the interlocutors’ biographies by mental health professionals; and the reflection on the implications of such discursive processes and narratives in the psychological and psychiatric practices and in the processes of negotiation of meanings among professionals and people in transition, on the light of the complexity of the narratives and the exigencies of people.
Narrative interviews (Hermanns, 2004) with 25 people in transition and episodic interviews (Flick, 2007) with 11 professional figures have been deployed. Both types of interviews allow to highlight points of view and personal theories used by the participants to give sense to the process of gender transition and the own experience, told and reconstructed in the dialogue. The methods for the analysis have included discourse analysis (Potter e Wheterell, 1987) and narrative analysis, in particular the version of dialogic-performative analysis (Riessman, 2008), through the identification of interpretive repertoires and self-positions. Narrative and discursive processes have been analyzed underlying the pragmatic and performative elements and the multivoiceness, mine included, as researcher in relation to the others.
From the analysis of the interviews, different voices and discourses related to the own biography, as well as to the practices by the professionals, emerge. For the first objective, different narrative and discursive modalities underlie the impact and the pragmatic effect of some dimensions of meaning, such as those related to the ideal or reconstructed “normality”, to the “right-wrong body”, to the deterministic “nature”, to the interpersonal “recognition”, to “pathology” or “deviance” and finally, to the agency and the idiosyncraticity in the construction of the identity. For the second objective, it is possible to underlie the impact and the pragmatic effect of other dimensions of meaning, such as “gender dysphoria” as an ambiguous category, the “adaptation to reality” as an assumption in the transition, “subjectivity versus objectivity”, the “non-binary people” as a dilemma and finally, the “responsibility” and the “power” as critical and relevant aspects in the clinical practice.
This research can contribute to highlight the narrative specificities and the exigencies of both groups, and in particular of the people in transition. This can be useful in order to inform and to offer further elements for the comprehension of trans experiences and life stories in the clinical field, problematizing the concept of diagnosis. Finally, the results can contribute to a reflexive knowledge of the clinical work for the gender transition, referring to the different modalities of signify both the diagnosis and the relationship and their pragmatic effects
