Social representations of transsexual women living with HIV/AIDS.

Objectives: identify the social representations of transsexual women living with HIV/AIDS.

Methods: this is a qualitative descriptive exploratory study, based on the theory of social representations, conducted with six HIV/AIDS seropositive transsexual women from a hospital for patients with HIV/AIDS. For data collection, semi-structured interviews were conducted and later transcribed and analyzed with the help of Iramuteq (version 0.7) to produce a dendrogram of the descending hierarchical classification.

Results: data were grouped into three classes: social thought and health/disease process; subjectivity and identity coping; and social determination and the context of vulnerability.

Final Considerations: the elements of social representations were identified, based on commonsense knowledge, resulting from the way of thinking and acting and associated with the syndrome and social actors and sectors of the daily life of transsexual women. This study highlights the relevance of representational processes for humanized health care.