Gender and Public Health: Approach in terms of Sexual Diversity

Abstract

As one of the categories used to assess health inequities, gender in public health has limited its meaning to the generally accepted conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Such is the case with Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health, represented by Jaime Breilh and Débora Tajer, since for the former, gender constitutes a perspective to focus the struggle for health and life arising from a cultural construction around the differences sexual relations between men and women; and for the second, the gender perspective implies incorporating the way in which the social asymmetries between men and women differentially determine the health-disease-care process in both generic groups. A similar situation arises with the Ecosocial Epidemiology of Nancy Krieger, since gender is understood as the set of cultural conventions about the “must be” of relations between the sexes, whose permutations may have relevance to any health outcome. Finally, for Social Epidemiology (WHO), gender is a structural determinant of health that includes those characteristics of women and men socially constructed as models of masculinity and femininity, whose negative effects on the burden of morbidity and mortality affect mainly girls and women. Based on this, it is concluded that public health has traditionally been dealing with the health-gender relationship from a binary perspective that does not fully account for the particularities of health-disease processes or heterosexual persons, nor of the sexually diverse.