Trajetórias educacionais de mulheres trans e travestis: desafios e perspectivas na educação básica em São Luís/MA

Abstract

Educational Trajectories of Trans Women and Travestis: challenges and perspectives in basic education in São Luís/MA investigates how trans women and travestis narrate their trajectories through basic education and the meanings they attribute to the experiences lived within the school environment. The relevance of this investigation is articulated across three dimensions: epistemological, in recognizing the narratives of these women not as illustrations of pre-existing data, but as a form of knowledge constructed from the standpoint of those who lived what is sought to be understood; political, in shifting the axis of knowledge production from the institutional perspective to the perspective of the subjects themselves, acknowledging that these voices hold authority to speak about what they have experienced; and analytical, in taking São Luís/MA as a situated empirical context, interrogating how the local political and institutional environment appears in the narrated trajectories and how national policies produce distinct effects in specific subnational contexts. The general objective is to understand how these women narrate their educational trajectories and the meanings they assign to the experiences lived within the school space. The approach is qualitative, grounded in Bourdieu's reflexive sociology (1989), in dialogue with Foucault (1979, 1988), Butler (2003), and scholars from the fields of gender studies, sexuality, and education. The central technique is the narrative interview, as theorized by Jovchelovitch and Bauer (2002), which allows access to the subjective dimensions of experience and the meanings that subjects attribute to their trajectories. Four trans women and travestis who attended public basic education schools in São Luís/MA participated in the research, selected through snowball sampling as outlined by Vinuto (2014). The findings reveal three central analytical patterns: exclusion operates predominantly in a diffuse manner, through silence, omission, and the naturalization of practices that deny legitimacy to certain forms of existence, without needing to declare itself in order to produce its effects; the school persistence of the participants was not guaranteed by the institution, but rather constructed by the subjects themselves with the support of informal networks of care and protection located in the interstices of the pedagogical space, exposing the structural limits of formal inclusion policies; and there is a structuring tension between the normative advances that have been achieved and the everyday practices of non-recognition that persist even where rights are formally guaranteed. It is concluded that the school exclusion of trans women and travestis is not capturable through dropout rates, it is inscribed in bodies, subjectivities, and the survival strategies these women construct in the face of a space that systematically refuses to recognize them as legitimate subjects, pointing to the need for public retention policies that go beyond enrollment figures and formal regulations.