Travesti

In Argentina in particular it is an explicitly political identity, developed through decades of organising against police violence and state exclusion.

The refusal is the point. Travesti activists and theorists have argued consistently that travesti is not a failed or partial version of womanhood, and not a Spanish word for transgender woman, but a position of its own, formed by a specific history of class, race, sex work, criminalisation and police violence. As Marlene Wayar puts it in Travesti: una teoría lo suficientemente buena, the point is not to be admitted to an existing category but to insist on the one that already exists.

That body of thought is usually called teoría travesti, and it is a substantial Latin American intellectual tradition rather than a slogan. Lohana Berkins, Marlene Wayar and Diana Sacayán are its central figures.

The word's history runs the other way from its politics. Travesti began as an insult and was used as one for decades. Its reclamation is real but not universal, and some people the word is applied to reject it outright. Outsiders should follow individual usage and should not apply the word to someone who has not used it about themselves.

Which countries, and why that matters

Travesti is not a single pan-Latin American identity, and describing it that way, as this page did previously, erases exactly the specificity the word was built to protect.

• Argentina is where travesti is most developed as an explicit political identity, with its own theory, its own organisations and its own legislative programme.
• Brazil has the largest travesti population and a distinct history, closely tied to sex work, urban migration and the country's extremely high rate of murders of travestis and trans people. Don Kulick's 1998 ethnography, based on fieldwork in Salvador, remains the reference point in the English-language literature and is also criticised for the framings it imported.
• Peru, Chile, Uruguay and elsewhere use the word with local histories and local political weight, and in some contexts it remains primarily pejorative.

An important note

Travesti is a Latin American identity with a specific political history. It is not a general-purpose word for a feminine person assigned male at birth, and it is not interchangeable with transgender woman: many travestis have explicitly refused that translation. Note also the false friend: in Spain and in older Spanish usage, travesti and travestí can mean cross-dresser or drag performer, which is a different thing again.

Travesticidio

Travesticidio is the term Argentine travesti activism developed for the killing of a travesti as a specific form of gender violence, alongside transfemicidio. It exists because femicide law, written around cisgender women, did not reliably capture what was happening to travestis, and because "homicide" erased the reason.

The related concept of travesticidio social is broader and, in the movement's own framing, more important: the argument that travestis are killed slowly by systematic exclusion from schooling, housing, formal employment and healthcare, long before anybody picks up a weapon. Berkins and Josefina Fernández's 2005 study La gesta del nombre propio, the first large survey of travesti living conditions in Argentina, is the document that made this case with data.

Figures of 35 to 40 years for travesti life expectancy circulate widely and are quoted by activists and officials alike. They should be handled carefully: they are generally derived from the average age at death in reported cases rather than from a life table, which is a different statistic. The underlying picture, of drastically shortened lives, is not in doubt. The specific number is weaker than its confident repetition suggests.

In June 2018, a Buenos Aires court convicted Gabriel Marino of Diana Sacayán's murder and, for the first time in Argentine legal history, framed the crime as a travesticidio, applying the aggravating factor of hatred of gender identity. In October 2020 the Cámara Federal de Casación Penal upheld the life sentence but removed that aggravator, a decision the public prosecutor's office challenged and travesti organisations condemned. Both halves belong on this page: the recognition was real, and it was not secure.

Argentine law

• Ley 26.743, Gender Identity Law (2012). Allows any person to change their registered name and gender by simple declaration, with no medical diagnosis, no surgery and no judicial approval, and guarantees access to gender-affirming healthcare. At the time it was the most far-reaching law of its kind anywhere, and it remains a reference model in European debates on self-determination.
• Ley 27.636, the Diana Sacayán and Lohana Berkins Law (2021). Passed by the Chamber of Deputies on 11 June 2021 and the Senate on 24 June 2021, promulgated on 8 July 2021. It reserves at least 1% of national public sector posts for travesti, transsexual and transgender people and creates incentives for private employers. It is the direct legislative answer to the argument that exclusion from formal work is what kills people.

• Lohana Berkins (1965 to 2016), Argentine travesti activist; co-author of La gesta del nombre propio; founder of ALITT and of the Nadia Echazú cooperative school, the first school in Latin America run by and for travesti and trans people; central to the campaign that produced the 2012 Gender Identity Law.
• Diana Sacayán (1975 to 2015), Argentine travesti activist of Diaguita descent; founder of the Movimiento Antidiscriminatorio de Liberación; architect of the Buenos Aires provincial employment quota that became the model for the 2021 national law; murdered in October 2015.
• Marlene Wayar (born 1968), Argentine travesti theorist, psychologist and editor; author of Travesti: una teoría lo suficientemente buena.
• Claudia Pía Baudracco (1970 to 2012), co-founder of ATTTA, who died months before the Gender Identity Law she had campaigned for was passed.