The Brazilian norm that establishes the conditions for the health care for transsexuals, despite reflecting important achievements of this population, reveals the complexity of the advancement of sexual rights in the field of public health. This paper aims to review the advances, challenges and dilemmas in the establishment of this public health policy, discussing the ambivalence in the process of building the technical standard. It releases two parallel chains of the inclusion of the debate about transgender health care in the Health Ministry: the judicialization and the committment with the government program "Brazil without Homophobia". It indicates the partial progress achieved by the publication of the standard, as it established exclusion areas for potential beneficiaries of the same set of health actions, specifically the transvestites, at the same time it stated the right to health care for transsexuals. The hypothesis sustained is that heteronormativity and the binary of gender work as limiting factors for the democratization of the health policy.
transsexualism; homophobia; sexual diversity; heteronormativity; transvestites