Criminalizing Transgender Medicine: Pioneering Doctors and Transsexual Patients during the Military Dictatorship in Brazil, 1964–85

After an order from the Fourth Regional Federal Court pressured the public health system to offer free gender-affirming surgeries in 2008, national and foreign observers made trans issues in Brazil a hot media topic. The celebratory tone of headlines like “Brazil’s Court Rules that Surgery is a Constitutional Right for Residents” obscured not only the rise of transphobic violence but also a decades-long struggle for trans rights that began at the height of the military dictatorship when the plastic surgeon who performed the country’s first ‘sex change’ surgery received a two-year prison sentence for mutilating a healthy body. Although for decades the conviction of Dr. Roberto Farina late in 1978 cast a pall over trans people seeking surgical treatment and over physicians who wanted to assist them, today very few people inside and outside Brazil know the stories of the pioneering specialists who developed transgender medicine in the country, the trans people who actively sought it, and the consequences they paid for it. This paper briefly outlines the contours of Farina’s trial and the ban on gender-affirming surgery. It then focuses on how two of his transsexual patients advocated for themselves and forged complex everyday lives of solidarity, struggle, community, and resistance as ideas about sex and gender evolved during the military regime. Although an appeals court absolved Farina in 1979, drawing attention to his case explains why transition surgeries remained illegal until 1997 and illuminate the legal groundwork for the 2008 federal ruling. The life stories of two of his patients, Walderine Nogueira and Jõao Nery, provide possible explanations for the longstanding overrepresentation of trans women over trans men in Brazilian society and culture today.