Travesti (gender identity)

Despite being an emic concept widely used throughout the region, making it paradoxical to reduce the terms to universal explanations. from where it was imported into Portuguese with the same meaning. Transvestite ( in Spanish and Portuguese) gained usage in scientific and medical literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by the terms "transsexual" and "transgender". The original use of travesti refers to the act of cross-dressing and became extended in the 1960s to refer to individuals who dressed as women as a performance or in their day-to-day lives. Its differentiation from the notions of "transsexual" and "trans woman" is complex and can vary depending on the context, ranging from considering it a regional equivalent to a unique identity. Writing for the Latin American Research Review in 2020, Joseph M. Pierce claimed that in Hispanic American countries, "as a general category, (transgender) or the more popular trans [...] refers to people who make identitarian, corporeal, and social efforts to live as members of the gender that differs from the normative sex that they were assigned at birth." Comparing it to the term , he noted that: in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, [] refers most frequently to people assigned male sex at birth and who feminize their bodies, dress, and behavior; prefer feminine pronouns and forms of address; and often make significant bodily transformations by injecting silicone or taking hormonal treatments but do not necessarily seek sex-reassignment surgery. [...] ... the specific Latin American conceptual and identity marker involves gender variance but not always gendered difference. While transgender, trans, and transsexual are terms that refer to changing gender and sex through legal, corporeal, or social mechanisms, a may have been assigned "male" at birth but does not necessarily consider herself a woman (though some do). [...] For many travestis the term transgender depoliticizes a violent history of social and economic marginalization. The term , in contrast, retains this class difference and popular resonance, and is thus a political, rather than a psychological, or even corporeal identification. The imposition of the transgender and transvestite categories by Anglo-American academics over identities has been considered by some to be colonizing and westernizing in nature and has been met with resistance by the community. Originally used colloquially as a pejorative term, the category has been reappropriated by Brazilian, and political identity. Despite its reappropriation by some as a political identity, in some places (especially Spain) For example, in 2020 a Spanish journalist caused controversy and had to make a public apology after using the term to refer to late media personality La Veneno. Although the use of the term is still common in Spanish, some contemporary authors reject it to avoid confusion with the practice of cross-dressing, as well as the use of the suffix -ism, which comes from the medical sciences and is considered pathologizing. In response to this, the use of the terms (Portuguese) or (Spanish) has become widespread in Brazilian academic literature since the 2000s and has been adopted by some Spanish-speaking authors, while others have opted for the words (roughly "travestity"), and (roughly "transvestiteness" or "transvestment") are used as an alternative to "transvestism", but to designate (i.e. drag performers). The Hispanicism travestism () is sometimes seen in articles in English about the topic, especially by South American authors. Brazilian transgender activists, Indianarae Siqueira and Erika Hilton, coined the term transvestigênere (), to encompass all the spectrum of travesti, transgender, and transsexual experiences in a unifying word. The term is inclusive of trans non-binary people, trans men, trans women, and transmasculine individuals, using neolingual ending. Some also use the term travesty, ending with the letter y, to mean the same as travesti, but sounding more artistic, subversive, or decolonial. ==History and culture==

Argentina , away from the police. An important historical source of information on the travesti community during the 20th century are the firsthand accounts of Malva Solís, who emigrated from Chile as a teenager and lived in Argentina until her death in 2015, at the age of 93. She was regarded as the longest-lived travesti from the country. After collecting testimonies from travestis over the age of seventy, Josefina Fernández found in 2004 that most of them regarded the first period of Juan Perón's government—who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955—as "the one that most clearly began the persecution of gay men and travestis, whether or not they practiced street prostitution." The prison was a recurring meeting point for travestis and continued to be so until the 21st-century. As a travesti from Buenos Aires recalled in 2019: "They were 6 days of freedom and 350 in prison. I'm not exaggerating. So it was for us. This is how it was before and after the dictatorship, even worse after the dictatorship. Those days it was something magical: because from being discriminated against we would turn into diva-like. If there were no travestis in a carnival parade, it seemed like something was missing." According to Malva Solís, two travestis from La Boca's carnival parade named Cualo and Pepa "La Carbonera" pioneered of the figure of the "murgas vedette", an innovation that began around 1961. In 2011, Solís reflected on the importance of Carnival celebrations for travestis: "I think to myself, that the leitmotif of the travestis who integrated the murgas was to bring out from the bottom of their soul their repressed self of the rest of the year. Everyone saw them and applauded them, but could not understand that behind that bright facade there was a desire, the desire to be recognized and accepted in order to live in freedom." Her show paved the way door to later performances by local travestis. Solís told researcher María Soledad Cutuli in 2013:Beginning with Coccinelle (...) there is a whole opening, something new that is coming. A lot of 'siliconized' [performers] came, plastic surgeries; social openness, (...) new opportunities for mariconas, 'the travesti artist' is inaugurated. (...) From then on a new way of life opened. (...) The culture of the puto artist, all of them were already walking around with cotton stuffing to make their breasts, and they were already going out to sing, to dance... Around 1964, travesti artists—at that time named lenci, in reference to a type of cloth, because they "were like little rag dolls"—met at an apartment on Avenida Callao, where they rehearsed musical acts and prepared to go out to nightclub or theater shows. She also mentioned the travestis of the "following era", which included Graciela Scott, Claudia Prado and herself, who debuted in 1975. After Evelyn there was a fifteen year period of suppression for the community due to military persecution. The arrival of industrial silicone in Buenos Aires radically transformed travesti bodies and subjectivities. In the 1980s, famous actress and vedette Moria Casán became a role model for local travestis, not only for her voluptuous body, but also for her public image of sexual ease. In 1986, Canal 9 journalist José de Zer reported, and at the same time denounced, the murder of travestis working on the Pan-American Highway. Due to the television report, both the journalist and the channel were sued and faced trial, and travestis had to organize themselves during the following years so as to make their ignored identity appear in the mass media. and their first appearances on television coincided with the organized appearance of the travestis on the public scene and in the streets of Buenos Aires. As the first travesti to become a national celebrity, she is regarded as a symbol of the social milieu of the 1990s and paved the way for other Argentine travestis and trans women to gain popularity as vedettes, most notably Flor de la V. In November 2007, the first issue of El Teje, the first periodical written by travestis in Latin America, was published in a joint initiative between activists and the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center. By the late 2010s, the travesti community of Buenos Aires and its surroundings gained recognition for its creative and artistic contributions, and had inserted itself in the "queer countercultural scene", a circuit of theaters, bars, and cultural centers such as Casa Brandon, Tierra Violeta, MU Trinchera Boutique and, more recently, Feliza and Maricafé. It focuses on the lives of a group of travestis from Córdoba, Argentina and their work as prostitutes at Sarmiento Park. However, Sosa Villada has denied that the book was conceived as an act of activism or visibility, claiming that focusing discussions about travestis around marginality and sex work silences their current cultural contributions to society. The ongoing editorial success of Las malas has sparked interest in local transgender literature, and has been framed within a so-called "new Latin American boom", while several non-male authors from the region have captured the attention of the international market. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina in March 2020, travestis were one of the groups most affected by the lockdown, since most of them rely on prostitution for income, that they were then left without. In many cases they were under threat of eviction from the hotels where they were already paying elevated prices. In 2021, Flor de la V, a transgender Argentinian celebrity, announced that she no longer identified as a trans woman but as a travesti, writing: "I discovered a more correct way to get in touch with how I feel: neither woman, nor heterosexual, nor homosexual, nor bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender system, my political construction in this society is that of a pure-bred travesti. That what I am and what I want and choose to be." Brazil Anthropologist Don Kulick noted that: "Travestis appear to exist throughout Latin America, but in no other country are they as numerous and well known as in Brazil, where they occupy a strikingly visible place in both social space and the cultural imaginary." For this reason, they are frequently invoked by social commentators as symbols of Brazil itself. One of the most prominent travestis in the Brazilian cultural imaginary of the late 20th century was Roberta Close, who became a household name in the mid-1980s and was "widely acclaimed to be the most beautiful woman in Brazil," posing in Playboy and regularly appearing in television and several other publications. Historically, Brazilians used the word to denominate travestis, which is now considered a transphobic slur. In recent years, hiring trans women has become popular in the advertising industry, although at the same time differentiating them from transvestites. A 14-year-old teenager, Mario Luis Palmieri, had been found murdered and the hypothesis held by the police was that of a homosexual crime of passion, unleashing one of the most famous persecutions of LGBT identities in the history of Paraguay. Paraguayan travestis use a secret language called jeito—originated in the field of prostitution— to protect themselves from clients, the police, or any person strange to the places where they work and that threatens the security of the group. Some of its words are rua (street), odara (the travesti head of a prostitution area), alibán (police), and fregués (clients). Uruguay Gloria Meneses lived openly as a travesti from the 1950s and was known as "the mother of travestis". Spain The arrival of the medical model of transsexuality was earlier in Europe than in Latin America, and therefore its impact was different in each region. ==Academic research==

Overview After a long period of criminalization, "sexual deviations" became an object of study in the medical and sexual sciences, which established the different forms of deviation. Between 1870 and 1920, a large amount of research was produced about people who cross-dressed or wished to adopt the role assigned to the opposite sex. During the 1950s, the term transsexual—first used by American sexologist David Oliver Cauldwell—gained relevance at the same time that sexual identity clinics and sex change surgery emerged. This caused transvestism to be temporarily put aside as a topic of medical interest in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Scholarship produced on South American travestis has largely been produced by non-trans academics from the Global North, something that has been vocally critiqued by activists. Brazil is the country with the most study of these identities, and the works written in and about Brazilian travestis outnumber those of any other Latin American country. While academic interest in Brazilian travesti prostitutes began to spread in the 1990s and early 2000s—through international researches like Don Kulick, Peter Fry, and Richard Parker, as well as local authors such as Marcos Renato Benedetti and Helio Silva—travesti identities didn't become a central theme in the country's gender studies until the mid-to-late-2000s, alongside the growing influence of queer theory, post-structuralism and LGBT activism in academic literature. Since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, several ideas put forward by American philosopher Judith Butler—like the claim that the concept of a biological sex is itself a gendered notion—have been of great impact for the academic analysis of travestis and gender studies in general. As a third gender A very wide range of anthropological studies have investigated travestis on the hypothesis that they should be interpreted as an expression of a third gender or sex, in the same manner of the berdaches of North America, the hijras of India, the muxes of Mexico, the kathoey of Thailand, the māhū of Tahiti, the fa'afafine of Samoa, and the xanith of Oman, among other identities. The idea of a third gender was later put forward in the mid-1990s by authors such as Gilbert Herdt, Will Roscoe, Hilda Habychain, and Anne Bolin; and extended to other non-Western peoples. In 1998, Kulick argued that: "Travestis may well be considered to be a 'third,' in some of the senses in which Marjorie Garber uses that term, but they are not a third that is situated outside or beyond a gendered binary." Writing for The Guardian in 2019, Victor Madrigal-Borloz listed the travesti people from Brazil and Argentina as one of the many worldwide identities that are neither male or female, alongside the yimpininni of the Tiwi people in Australia, as well as fa'afafine in Samoa, two spirit in Canada and the United States, and hijra in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. As a reinforcement of gender binarism With her 1989 book Travestism and the Politics of Gender, Annie Woodhouse established herself among the researchers that consider travestism a reinforcement of gender identities, in this case the female identity. Woodhouse argued that travestis see gender as something that is rigidly demarcated between masculinity and femininity and, in this sense, reproduce traditional gender roles that objectify women. In her 1993 and 1995 researches on travestism, Argentine anthropologist Victoria Barreda criticized the third gender category, arguing that travestis construct an identity that necessarily takes gender stereotypes as a reference point. Another researcher who follows this trend is Richard Ekins, who described transvestites as "feminized men". Among the research based on participant observation, French anthropologist Annick Prieur has been considered a pioneer for her 1998 ethnography on the travesti community from the suburbs of Mexico City, in which she argued that they reproduce their society's gender binarism. Kulick's conclusions are far removed from later postmodern positions, as he argued that the travesti identity is configured from conservative social structures. He used the term "not-men" to refer to travestis, claiming he chose it: "partly for want of a culturally elaborated label and partly to foreground my conviction that the gender system that makes it possible for travestis to emerge and make sense is one that is massively oriented towards, if not determined by, male subjectivity, male desire, and male pleasure, as those are culturally elaborated in Brazil." He further explained: It is important to understand that the claim I am making here is that travestis share a gender with women, not that they are women (or that women are travesti—even if that latter proposition might be a fruitful one to explore further). The distinction is crucial. Individual travestis will not always or necessarily share individual women's roles, goals, or social status. (...) However, inasmuch as travestis share the same gender with women, they are understood to share (and they feel themselves to share) with women a whole spectrum of tastes, perceptions, behaviors, styles, feelings, and desires. Kulick's research had a much broader international impact than that of his predecessors, due to its insertion in North American academia and for being published in English. In recent years, there have been discussions regarding the so-called "travesti theory", a critical theory that proposes the construction of their own paradigm, epistemology, and ontology, through which the established discourses can be disarticulated in order to produce new knowledge production modes on the travesti population, from a regional and decolonizing perspective. Peruvian scholar Malú Machuca Rose described travesti as "the refusal to be trans, the refusal to be woman, the refusal to be intelligible. (...) Travesti is classed and raced: it means you do not present femininely all of the time because you cannot afford to." ==Living conditions==

Travestis are a historically vulnerable and criminalized population, victims of social exclusion and structural violence. Several LGBT activists, journalists, and artists denounce the violence and early death to which the travesti population is subjected as an authentic genocide. A study carried out in 2011 in Central America revealed, for example, that more than 80% of the surveyed population felt they have the right to attack trans and travesti people because of their way of being. In his pioneering investigation of the travesti population of Salvador, Bahia in the 1990s, anthropologist Don Kulick found that they are "one of the most marginalized and despised groups in Brazilian society." According to a 2017 research published by the Ministry of Defense of Argentina titled La revolución de las mariposas, 74.6% of trans women and travestis in Buenos Aires said they had suffered some type of violence, a high number, although lower than that registered in 2005, which was 91.9%. In 2021, it is estimated that a travesti or trans person dies violently every 48 hours in Brazil, with at least 80 murders in the first half of the year. Brazil is considered "the most transphobic country in the world", Lohana Berkins reflected in 2015: "Reaching old age is for a travesti like belonging to an exclusive club, because the mishaps that accompany marginal life—which lead to a death that is always considered premature in terms of population statistics—are the perennial consequences of a persecuted identity."—has been extended to refer to the hate crime understood as the murder of a travesti due to her gender condition. In 2015, the murder case of activist Diana Sacayán became the first precedent in Argentina and in Latin America to be criminally judged as a "travesticide". According to Blas Radi and Alejandra Sardá-Chandiramani: Travesticide/transfemicide is the end of a continuum of violence that begins with the expulsion of home, exclusion from education, the health system and labor market, early initiation into prostitution/sex work, the permanent risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, criminalization, social stigmatization, pathologization, persecution and police violence. This pattern of violence constitutes the space of experience for trans women and travesties, which is mirrored in their waning horizon of expectations. In it, death is nothing extraordinary; on the contrary, in the words of Octavio Paz "life and death are inseparable, and each time the first loses significance, the second becomes insignificant". This mostly conflicts their relationships with their families and with the educational system, which are marked by discrimination and later abandonment. Most are either expelled from their families or left them of their own accord—generally between the ages of thirteen and eighteen—and in most cases judge the occasion as the beginning of their new lives as travestis. They are usually forced to leave their towns or even countries in search of less hostile locations. The association between travestis and prostitution constitutes one of the most widespread "common sense representations in Latin American societies".—role in the construction of their identity. Brazilian organization ANTRA estimates that 90% of travestis and trans women of the country resort to prostitution at least once in their life. According to La revolución de las mariposas, 88% of travestis and trans women from Buenos Aires never had a formal job, while 51.5% never had a job of any kind. Fear of rejection by health workers often leads them to self-medicate and to attend health institutions when conditions or diseases are already at very advanced levels. Due to the strong stereotype towards travestis in relation to prostitution and HIV, they are usually automatically referred to HIV/AIDS centers every time they attend a medical center, ignoring their other health needs. Even though the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in travestis is real, it stems from a process of social exclusion that "ends up incarnating in travesti bodies and confirming the stereotype." while a research published in Global Public Health in 2016 found that there is a 30% prevalence of the virus in the travesti population of Lima, Peru. Some health systems continue to include travestis under the epidemiological category of "men who have sex with men" (MSM), with little consideration of their unique situation and needs. In Buenos Aires, 65.1% of travestis and trans women live in rental rooms in hotels, private houses, pensions or apartments, whether authorized by the competent body or "taken" by those who manage them irregularly. According to a study carried out by INDEC and INADI in 2012, 46% of the travesti and trans women population in Argentina lived in deficit housing, while another study carried out by ATTTA and Fundacion Huesped in 2014 indicated that one third of them lived in poor households, particularly in the Northwest region of the country. ==Activism==

Argentine movement 1990—2004 Travesti identity has an important history of political mobilization in Argentina, where it is proudly claimed as the "political locus par excellence" of resistance to the policies of gender binarism and cissexism. Argentine travestis began to organize between the late 1980s and early 1990s, in repudiation of persecution, mistreatment, and police violence, as well as the police edicts (Spanish: ) in force at that time. Unlike the scandalous public attitude of travestis, transsexuals like Urbina showed themselves in television as sensitive and affected, qualities they most associated with femininity. Others believe the creation of (TU; English: United Travestis) precedes that of ATA, and regard it as the first travesti organization in the country. (right) and the lawyer for both groups (center) at the Casa Rosada in 1994, asking to have a hearing with the President. María Belén Correa, another of the travestis that began to organize in the early 1990s, also became involved with activism through Gays DC, which she contacted in 1993 seeking legal help. (left) and Correa before attending a 1998 feminist demonstration, holding a sign that reads: "We travestis repudiate violence against women". One of the first major political struggles of travestis occurred within the context of the 1994 amendment of the Constitution of Argentina and revolved around the inclusion of an article of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation in the new constitution of the city of Buenos Aires. The inclusion in particular was that of Berkins, who got into the women's rights movement through meetings with lesbian feminists such as Alejandra Sarda, Ilse Fuskova, Chela Nadio, and Fabiana Tron. Following this approach to gender theory, Around 1995, the gay magazine NX organized meetings to discuss the problem of sexual minorities in the country and travesti groups were invited to share their life experiences. a student collective from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which pioneered queer theory in the country and remained active from 1993 to 1996. In 1997, members of this group formed the (AEQ; English: Queer Studies Area) within the (also of the UBA), This distancing was also due to the reconfiguration of the local LGBT movement in response to the HIV epidemic. On May 9, 2012, the Argentine National Congress passed the Gender Identity Law (Spanish: ), which made the country one of the world's most progressive in terms of transgender rights. It allows people to officially change their gender identities without facing barriers such as hormone therapy, surgery, psychiatric diagnosis or judge approval. The law has been celebrated as a great victory for the local LGBT movement. Nevertheless, activist Marlene Wayar soon criticized the law claiming that travestis can only choose to change their legal gender to "female", a disacknowledgement of their perceived identity. Since the implementation of the Gender Identity Law, there have been efforts by activists in search of the legal recognition of non-binary genders such as travesti. She initially obtained a favorable ruling from a Buenos Aires judge, which was later rejected by the Chamber of Appeals (Spanish: ), its three judges citing the Real Academia Española's official definition of "travesti" as their reasoning. The measure was criticized by various travesti and non-binary activists, who say that the letter X makes their identities invisible and that it actually reinforces the binary by othering them. On June 24, 2021, the Argentine Senate passed the travesti-trans job quota law (Spanish: ), which established that the state must hire at least 1 percent of the public administration staff to travesti and trans people. The official name of the law is Law for the Promotion of Access to Formal Employment for Travestis, Transsexuals and Transgender Persons "Diana Sacayán - Lohana Berkins" (Spanish: ). Brazilian movement Travesti activism—located within the broader transgender rights movement—has been marked by its tensions and differences with transsexual-identified groups. In the late 1990s, gender identity-oriented activism emerged in Brazil, which adopted the terms "trans" and "transsexual" on the recommendation of foreign activists. As a result, the emerging Brazilian travesti movement of the 1990s and early 2000s has been developed mainly through AIDS-related funding, which resulted in the emergence of their own formal organizations, programs and venues. It was held following the dissolution of the CNT and the subsequent involvement of many of its members with ANTRA. Unlike countries like Argentina, where there is a quota law for travesti and trans people in the public administration, Brazil is far from institutionalizing the labor inclusion of the trans community, although there are many travesti-led projects, such as Transgarçonne, an initiative of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; Capacitrans, founded by Andréa Brazil; and TransEmpregos, created by Márcia Rocha, the largest job platform for trans people in the country. Chilean movement On April 22, 1973, a group of young travestis gathered in the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, holding the first protest of sexual diversity in the history of Chile. A key figure in the Chilean travesti movement and cultural scene is the poet Claudia Rodríguez, who began her activist career in the 1990s. Paraguayan movement in 2014. Paraguay is one of the most restrictive countries in the region with respect to the rights of transgender people. The first demonstrations of travestis and trans women took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s, mainly to defend their paradas (the places where sex work is carried out) and to protest police mistreatment and murder of their peers. At the international level, the main references of the movement are from Argentina, including Diana Sacayán, Lohana Berkins, Marlene Wayar, Marcela Romero, Diana Zurco, Camila Sosa Villada, Susy Shock and Alma Fernández. In this context, the claims of the (English: Travesti Coordinating Board) and later the (English: Uruguayan Trans Association), focused on the conquest of "negative rights": the end of discrimination and of police persecution. In 2002, the law on sex work was passed, legalizing the activity and undermining police surveillance in the streets. During the progressive governments of the Frente Amplio, the conquest of "positive rights" was achieved: in 2009 a law was approved that allows changing the gender and name in the identification documents and, in 2018, the (English: "Comprehensive Law for Trans People") was approved. Writing for La Diaria in 2020, Diego Sempol and Karina Pankievich pointed out that "the debates on the [Ley Integral para Personas Trans] were written in stone in the social imaginary and formatted trans memories in the public sphere," leading to the appearance of a series of testimonies that "broke a prolonged silence that put into discussion the recent Uruguayan past and the official accounts of state violence [during the civic-military dictatorship]". ==See also==