‘Having words for everything’. Institutionalizing gender migration in Spain (1998–2008)

Abstract

Working from an interdisciplinary perspective, this article examines the development of gender identity categories and the institutionalization of sex-reassignment procedures based on two different qualitative studies carried out during a 10-year span with transexual and transgendered people, activists and legal experts. In the context of the legal, social and political frameworks regulating gender migration in Spain in the last decade, the data reveal the proliferation of gender identity categories amidst increasing medicalization of trans folk, boundary policing and a growing tension between medical and political understandings of gender migration.