“If you are a male, go play soccer, go wallow, or go fight”: Narratives about gender roles from transgender and cisgender adolescents’ voices from the city of Medellín. "Si usted es varón vaya juegue futbol, vaya revuélquese o vaya pelee": Narrativas de roles de género en adolescentes transgénero y cisgénero de la ciudad de Medellín.

Abstract

To approach the comprehension of gender roles in a group of transgender and cisgender adolescents at ages ranging from 11 to 18 years old, residents of the city of Medellín, and understanding that in conservative societies such as the Colombian society, through the socializing process, strict models of adaptation and desirability of being a woman or a man are still maintained, where social roles assigned to sexes follow a binary logic within which trans identity expressions depict the contradiction of the social expectations regarding the triad sex/gender/politics, eight semi-structured interviews were developed. Such interviews, carried out from a narrativity perspective, were coconstructed raising unique and particular notions of the participants and understanding some of the elements in which these views converged, intersect and share their corresponding reflections. It was found that both trans and cis adolescents strongly question some of these established rules, evidencing the disadvantages and privileges that are bestowed on some or the others. With regards to the aforementioned, the exclusion of the participation of women in politics and the housework practice frequently appointed to them were explicitly stated in the accounts as paradigmatic of these asymmetrical gender norms. The genitality and human reproduction as a functionalist logic, which overloads the gender identity in the biological condition, are cast on serious doubts by trans participants, who attribute paramount importance to their own identifications, affective, emotional, and social needs in the construction of the gender identity. All of these participations are coinciding in the sense that they lay bare significant changes in the way that certain social roles derived from gender are constructed and demanded, approving then their transformation in favor of a less sexist look in the acknowledgement and endangerment of gender roles that are expected and possible for all people.