Photo Courtesy of iStock
By Emily Arama Sánchez
Transgender in Latin America. What does this mean and how can we articulate this struggle? From the Latin American perspective, we can appreciate its culture and vitality, while simultaneously neglecting the voices of those who we cannot represent. The transgender narrative is one of these voices. While I cannot speak to the personal experience of being transgender in Latin America, I can analyse it based on the way in which, throughout periods and places, narratives have become displaced to a point where the trans identity has become alienated or otherwise removed from the Latin American identity. It seems that, as Susan Stryker notes, because ‘transgender phenomena unsettle the categories on which the normative sexualities depend, their articulation can offer compelling opportunities for contesting the expansion of neoliberalism’s purview through homonormative strategies of minority assimilation.’ This article seeks to expand this articulation in three ways. First by discounting the idea that gender and sexual transgression in Latin America is in any way a new phenomenon by evidencing its presence in Latin America from in the pre-Hispanic world. Second, by investigating the depths of how, through resisting persecution from groups who wanted their existence eliminated, the trans identity went on to survive and have one of the most incredible legacies. Finally, instead of reading against the grain to isolate the trans identity as distinct from the Latin American, this article aims to read with the grain to intersect the Latin American and trans experience as something powerful that at times is misinterpreted outside of the Global South.
Primarily, it is crucial to note the logistical trouble in periodising the transgender identity, as it leads us to question how we go about establishing a chronology for a modern turn of phrase. Instead, we must look beyond terminology, towards a history of transgender before transgender. For evidence of gender and sexual transgression in Latin America, one not need look far. Take the Moche sex pots. The history of the Moche culture which ‘thrived from ca.50 to 850AD, in what is today northwestern Peru’, lies not in any ‘written documents’ but through the Moche’s adoption of visual strategies to ‘expand reproductive time and alter the definition of a reproductive act’ through their ‘ceramic artwork’. What proved particularly remarkable was its portrayal of agency in sex: the ceramics celebrated ‘the multiple pleasures of the body’ while depicting ‘anal sex as reproductive’ and not necessarily as just occurring between men and women, diverging from the Western heteronormative interpretation.
But much of this material ‘had been destroyed’ due to its perceived obscenity. So, if we then decipher earlier representations of trans identity, such as cross dressing, transvestism, and sodomy, we can start to understand where such historiography of trans identity gets lost. While ‘transgenderism in Latin America is a complex phenomenon’ - not least because of the wide range of regions it encompasses, but also because of some of its practices that include cross-dressing as part of cultural practice - it is nevertheless intriguing.
Figure 5.2.6 demonstrates this perfectly, depicting the Fiestas of the Antisuyu (1615), where “all the men dressed as women with their arrows dance huarmi auca”, where we can the fluidity of gendered dress as these men transcended gender roles. Another critical aspect to highlight would be the imposition of gender and sex constructions by the coloniser onto the pre-Hispanic Latin American culture. In La Crónica de Perú 1553-60, Pedro de Cieza de Leon’s descriptive account of the devil introducing different sets of vices works to encapsulate the critical tension between Spanish warrior culture and Andean sexual culture through the lens of gender. In it, he draws on reports from a Dominican Friar where he orientalises the native as religiously morally dubious through associations of them with what he notes as imitations of women, sexual relations in temples and through a grounding of their immoral character as being established from childhood.
It becomes clear here, that in both Spanish and Portuguese discourse sodomy is seen as a civilising rationale for invasion: the Spanish assault on memory would expand also onto gender binaries, confining sexual performance to colonial life. Through this arch, we are able to observe early attempts to erase elements of the trans identity that persisted in the pre-Hispanic culture through colonial invasion. The survival of this trans identity before an acute category was created is quite remarkable, because while it is far from what we recognise the trans identity as being today, it nevertheless foregrounds the presence of the transgender existence as completely natural and permeating throughout time.
Let us return to that keyword mentioned in the title of this article, that of ‘survival’. As we have seen, the trans identity that existed before transgender emerged as a category of identification continued to have an incredible prominence. But how did the evolution of the trans identity alter the struggle of its survival in Latin America? From the 1970s to early 2000s, essentially from the expansion of global libationary policies towards the end of the crossover between the AIDS crisis and the Cold War, Latin America witnessed an unsettling amount of unmediated unrecorded violence towards transgender people.
We can see this in Argentina as a key case study. Perón’s death in 1974 instigated ‘rapid surge of right-wing paramilitary attacks’ against people within the queer community. There was the contradiction that you had both the founding of the ‘Transexuales por el Derecho a la Vida y la Identidad’ (Transexuals for the Right to Life and Identity) in 1991, and simultaneously had ‘thousands of transgendered people…arrested every year’ (Gays por los derechos civilise, 1995, 33) with some disappearing and ‘later found murdered’ in cases which continued to ‘go uninvestigated.’ ‘Gays and lesbians no longer constituted the threat to be investigated and exposed’, instead by 1998, the mass media played a role in the days of anti-transgender panic wherein the transgendered were suddenly ‘forced to deal with unsolicited overexposure’. Such overexposure proceeded to violence both from people on the ground and those within institutions whereby the liberalism of Buenos Aires ‘was unable to inspire a single public act of solidarity when the transgendered charged the police with treatment’ after operatives were known to ‘beat and rob transgender sex workers’.
It seemed that in Latin America there was a dichotomy between what Sheilla L. Rodríguez Madera describes as ‘necropraxis’ and ‘necroresistance’; between the patterns manifested in everyday social situations delivered to ‘eliminate, symbolically and/or literally, trans people’ and ‘the ways in which trans people’ defied these ‘threats imposed by the necropraxis through “ordinary” acts manifested in their everyday life’. Not only were trans people resisting physical violence and killings, but they were fighting for their sexual rights and in places such as Puerto Rico had to combat a longer legacy entrenched in Latin American culture of ‘”machismo” equating “manliness” with power’. Additionally, the survival of a trans identity was significantly harder to maintain in areas such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic where there was a lack of an identifiable queer community. By contrast, the case of Chilean GLBTT activism provides us with an interesting arch of thought whereby we saw the struggle of trans identity as challenged by some within the trans community. The “traición travesti” (the transvestite treason) or in other words, the ‘transvestite/conservative alliance’ ‘continues to shut doors in the faces of transgender people’ as it distinguished and separated trans people from each other and from the gay movement based on their supposed moral character.
Perhaps the most challenging for trans people in their fight for survival was the trauma that came with it. Being displaced or met with violence from your family, friends and all the institutions you’ve ever known because of your gender identity in a world where you are already othered by the West is an experience none of us can begin to imagine. It is therefore impressive that the trans identity in Latin America was able to persist through the contempt it faced.
Ultimately, we come to reading with the grain to understand how, in their story of survival, trans people have been able to navigate themselves in Latin America through an assimilation of culture and gender identity during dark political currents. The mapping of global capitalism becomes a key case in point as the ‘neoliberal policies of governments throughout the Western hemisphere’ created ‘accelerated motion-change not seen since the epochal shift to monopoly capitalism.’ This shift to global capitalism had a grave impact on trans people across the world. In ‘the world of hemispheric and global trade agreements, of neoliberalism and Zapatismo’, many trans people were ‘pushed from public institutions created to shape, condition and support youth’ and faced ‘violent misogyny directed at trans women’, wherein there were strikingly ‘close parallels between transgender and nontransgender sex-working women who shared marginalized, policed, often nonwhite, working-class spaces.’ Here, ‘trans and gender-variant women’ were ‘not only killed as women, with overflowing sexual brutality, but also killed socially for disobeying the biologist mandate of conforming to live in a body whose gender has been assigned medically and with which they do not identify.’ Linda Heidenreich is particularly poignant here when asserting that ‘where we find gender, we find political economy; where we find political economy, we find gender’ as these two facets do not act in isolation but in fundamentally inform one another. As Jacob R. Longaker and Donald P. Haider-Markel account the ‘rise of leftists governments in the regions’ of Latin America ‘opened potential pathways for many previously marginalised groups…to seek recognition by the state’ but there is still a long way to go as indicated by Table 2.1 where we can see how Transgender Public Policy varied from 1995 to 2012.
In an interview with Mariela Castro in 2009, Anastasia Haydulina posited the future of sex and socialism in Cuba. In it, while Mariela Castro notes that Cuba has accomplished a lot in guaranteeing ‘transsexuals specicalized attention, including sex change surgeries’ and were working on a gender identity decree law to ‘make it easier for transsexuals to change their sex and identity papers, regardless of the sex change surgery’, we do not know the extent to which this was achieved. While some may immediately look to a source from Mariela Castro as linked to pro-government rhetoric of presenting Cuba in a brighter light than it was, they would be mistaken, as she outrightly states that ‘Cuban society is homophobic’ and that to avoid it Cuba needs to be explicit in ‘laws and policies’. Such statements that we know were written before Fidel Castro’s death and the succession of Miguel Díaz-Canel from Raúl Castro, implied a sense of responsibility as the first step to interrogating the state of gender and sexual inequality. The relative success of this aim is unknown, both because of the lack of power that Mariela would have realistically had in shaping policy formation, and because of the lack of transparency of truth in Cuba because of censorship. From data we do know, however, of Guatemala and Chile, we can go into depth on the complexity of the trans identity within Latin American culture.
While high levels of violence, disappearance and displacement have marked Guatemala whereby between 2008 and 2018, 47 trans people were murdered where the Maras and other culturally based strategies forced ‘trans people to adapt to the gender binary, causing them physical and mental damage’. Chile, on the other hand, while having ‘a lack of extreme violence’ isolates the trans identity through completely different mechanisms. As research has documented ‘highly racist attitudes among the Chilean population’ (which is linked to migration), the ‘embodiment of these axes of inequality in trans people is a complicated matter’, as it becomes a question of who matters based on the shade of your skin. What is rather emotionally charged is the fact that in Chile, ‘as well as other countries, trans people who die are frequently buried and identified with an NN (No Name) because their family members, who usually disown them at a young age, never claim their bodies.’ While this sense of erasure is not enforced as a constructed force to eliminate the trans identity, it is nevertheless heart-breaking and has led to a lack of legitimacy to the history of trans lives throughout Latin America.
To summarise quite a complicated issue, the transgender story of survival in Latin America is a powerful one. One that, after an analysis of the struggles trans people face in these different nations, provides us not just with evidence as to where we see physical violence perpetrated, but where we see psychological and cultural constructions of gender and sexual identities embedded into societies, which continue to marginalise the trans identity. Reading with the grain aids us in truly understanding what was there, what was for the most part intentionally lost and why. The trans experience in Latin America seems from this to be a story of survival even in the midst of silence. While there were some forms of knowledge and activism that provided us with what we know now about the history of the trans experience in Latin America, there is so much more that we do not know because of erasure. It is therefore vital to amplify the trans voices of Latin America to deconstruct that structural imposition of silence and to create spaces where their narratives can be recorded and heard by future generations.
Emily Arama Sánchez is a Cuban second-year History Student at King’s College London and is LatAm’s 2021-22 Cultural and Outreach Officer with a passion for an intersectional and international approach to history and politics.
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