Transgenerismos, una aproximación de etnografía extrema: entrevista a Norma Mejía

Abstract

The central themes in the life-thoughts-thesis of Norma Mejía. PhD in Social Anthropology and postoperative transsexual woman, are presented here in interview format. Mejía describes and analyzes everything she has seen and experienced from the perspective of extreme ethnography, in which object and subject become one, as well as the etic and emic visions, and the person who observes is part of the observed group. The peculiarity of her case resides in the strong autobiographical content of her discourse, which renders imposible the intended subject/object separation, so characteristic of social sciences. Mejía explains that when she was an eight-year-old boy living in Bogotá. his home town. The case of a male to female transexual person after going through Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) was widely covered by the mass media. It was then that he realized he wanted to be a transsexual person. Forty years later, when she was a transsexual prostitute living in Barcelona, she decided to write an Anthropology PhD thesis on the gods of traditional societies. but she ended up writing it about transsexualism. In the university, she learned that biology and genetics do not influence psychology due to the fact that human beings are social constructs. She had health problems in 2001 and quitted prostitution and anthropology. She got herself a modest job and a loan. She traveled to Thailand, underwent SRS and when she returned. she finished and presented her thesis, titled Transgenderisms. She then noticed that SRS had changed her, and not only physically speaking, so she reached the conclusion that, contrarily to what she had declared in her thesis, biology does influence people’s personalities. That is why, when the Government passed a law to make non-surgical sex change legal, she was against it. The article tackles this issue and several others that are offered here in an exercise of what Mejía defines as extreme ethnography.