A transfeminist enunciation locus in Latin America: geopolitical issues for a decolonial project from the world’s south

ABSTRACT

This essay intends to share perspectives that constitute, in multiple and contingent forms, a transfeminist enunciation locus in Latin America. Seeking approximations with decolonial and trans+feminist studies, in their relations with issues of gender identities and expressions, sexualities and bodily diversities, the perspectives we share are related to different geopolitical contexts in the region and, despite a situated emphasis on the Brazilian context, we attempt to delineate epistemic, political, economic and affective closeness for trans, travesti, non-binary lives throughout ‘Latin American’ territories. We are interested in working, from our travesti anthropofagies (Silva, 2018), with concepts such as decoloniality, cistem-world and cisheteronormativity, instrumentalising them in the sense of a broader transfeminist contribution than one merely linked to the realm of its ‘specific issues’. These approximations and interests converge in confronting historical contexts of growing conservatism, both general and specific to issues of gender identities and expressions, sexualities and bodily diversities, while a variety of resistance possibilities emerge across academic, institutional and social movement spheres. We will try to outline, from some episodes in the recent period, some strategies, propositions and confrontations which could be related to transfeminist theories and practices, as well as the political obstacles presented by our regional contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Transfeminism
• trans studies
• gender identity
• cisheteronormativity
• ciscoloniality

1. A transfeminist enunciation locus: Analysing and imagining theories and practices

This work aims to render visible some transfeminist displacements and propositions made from the ‘Latin American region’, understanding them as contributions to decolonial thinking and action that destabilises the hierarchies built by modernity/coloniality in the benefit of cistemic geopolitical interests. Here, transfeminisms are perceived as multiple and contingent perspectives working in the intersections of trans and feminist issues to displace and unsettle cissexism and transphobia that are nourished by these hierarchies. Transfeminist displacements and propositions, for instance, might utilise the language and strategies from feminist movements to demand that trans people have access to healthcare that is both trans-competent and regards trans people as whole human beings – in that, we believe the contributions from Scott-Dixon (2008) might be of interest to our readers, as they deal with the complexities and potentials in ‘trans’ and in ‘feminist’, and acknowledge feminist public health and materialist, anti-racist scholarship, to invite a social-determinants-of-health approach that is in dialogue with the priorities of trans communities, particularly those most affected by trans necropolitics, as Jaime Caravaca-Morera and Maria Itayra Padilha (2018) develop conceptually in a study.

Among these transfeminist displacements and propositions, we highlight those of the sex-gender order, which attempt to hierarchise bodies, identities, expressions and produce some of them as unintelligible and marginalised in relation to the violent and binary normativities of that order, among them cisheteronormativity, constituted by both ‘the heterosexual matrix as a foundation of kinship and the cisgender matrix as an organizer of mandatory assignments and experiences for gender identities; both with productive effects that are naturalized’ (Mattos & Cidade, 2016, p. 134). By referring to such supremacist production as related to the geopolitical interests of cistems, we attempt to frame transphobic, cissexist, cisheteronormative processes as an integral part of the development and dynamics of socioeconomic systems in the region.

In this sense, by proposing reflections about a transfeminist enunciation locus, this essay seeks to highlight the critical paths that are in opposition to the dehumanising processes designed and carried out through various bionecropolitical dispositifs, as noted by Mariah Rafaela Silva (2018) in her analysis of bionecropower and its racialised and territorialised relations with cisheteronormativity: as cisgenderness may be regarded as ‘a governmentality regime for bodies and sexualities’, it must be analysed as constitutively being ‘a racial marker’ (pp. 208, 213), race being constitutive of formulations of ‘normal’ in terms of bodies and genders. Our transfeminist locus intends to highlight some critical paths that connect ‘trans health’ not (only) to global north standards of care or business-oriented industries, but in particular to the community-based ‘slippery mutations and actions’ (p. 250) that produce lives in many ways different from cisnormative, straight life expectancies.

In bringing forward the concept of enunciation locus for this piece, we align ourselves with Latin American intellectual perspectives which consider that:

Affirming the enunciation locus means going against the hegemonic eurocentric paradigms that, even when speaking from a particular location, have assumed themselves to be universal, without interests and not situated. The enunciation locus is not solely marked by our geopolitical location within the modern/colonial world system, but it is also marked by racial, class, gender, sexual, etc., hierarchies that focus on the body. (Bernardino-Costa & Grosfoguel, 2016, p. 19)

Departing from this movement, we are interested in highlighting which insurgencies emerge against the hierarchies built by modernity/coloniality, particularly from trans, travesti, non-binary perspectives that are being constituted in the region, with their genealogies related to persecuted sex work, to the HIV/AIDS crisis, policies around LGBT issues in healthcare, education and justice, as well as dialogues and tensions with feminist theories and practices. From our situated knowledges, the authors – Viviane, as a white-Asian middle-class researcher, born in Southeastern Brazil, part of international discussions on trans depathologisation, and currently working at a Fund dedicated to resourcing trans communities; Maria Clara, as an Afro-Brazilian travesti born in Northeastern Brazil, currently pursuing a master’s degree in Education at the University of São Paulo, and working at the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo state supporting Congresswoman Erica Malunguinho – neither of us ‘disciplined’ in any health science but attempting to contribute in some way to the field, are proposing conversations that might be useful, when regarding trans, travesti, non-binary people in global public health.

Our insights for this essay are inspired by our commitments and relationships in academia and activism, as well as (for Maria Clara) institutional politics and (for Viviane) philanthropy, and our main objective in this paper is to engage with trans and cisgender researchers and professionals that read this important publication. We are acutely aware of the structural, intersectional barriers and violence faced by people of trans, travesti, non-binary, non-western gender identities, and share these words with our readership as an invitation to consider how trans studies, particularly research produced by trans people, might contribute to perspectives on global health in your institution and yourselves – in dialogue with trans researchers like Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus, Amets Suess, Jota Mombaça, Guilherme Almeida, Dora Santana, Mauro Cabral, Céu Cavalcanti, Hailey Kaas, Blas Radi and Paulo Romo, for instance. We do hope that this could be transformative of the ways people of trans, travesti, non-binary, non-western gender identities have crescently more resources and possibilities to participate in the design, implementation and evaluation of healthcare programmes that concern their communities; this includes the authors’ own theoretical and practical limitations, in terms of our perceived need to deepen the international connections between our Latin American, transfeminist references and African and Asian activist and academic ones – to frame this in a geopolitical sense that is an important aspect in the work of researchers like Raewyn Connell (2011; 2014).

Considering that Latin America is the leading region in terms of mapped structural violence against trans and travesti bodies and identities,¹ there is an urgent need to make the insurgencies that emerge in this regional context more visible. As a praxis of ontological affirmation, transfeminism can be related to decolonial political projects built around the imagination of other possible paradigms for relationships between existences. The emergence and resistance, in the Brazilian context, of activist networks like the National Association of Travestis and Transsexual People (ANTRA), of groups and knowledges led and produced by trans men and transmasculine people (Almeida, 2012; Coacci, 2018; Nery, 2012), of organisations such as the Brazilian Trans Education Institute (IBTE), of initiatives like the website transfeminismo.com, along with the recent election of several trans and black representatives at different governmental levels² – among them Erica Malunguinho, Érika Hilton and Robeyoncé Lima – are some results of the mobilisation guided by the principle that the trans and travesti populations – among others – have the fundamental right to recognition, and all other intertwined rights, which include the right to healthcare.

The Latin American context is experiencing a turn to the extreme right in the recent period, either through the election of heads of state, imperialist interventions and/or market-based influences that direct these societies towards models that reaffirm the hierarchies ‘developed’ by centuries of colonisation, extraction and ‘modernity’. In this context, through an intersectional analysis dedicated to the segments made vulnerable in complex ways, it is important to recognise and highlight actions that seek to institutionalise the precariousness and denial of trans and travesti people’s lives, through initiatives that ban non-binary, trans, travesti imaginaries and participation (as in educational curricula or professional sports), as well as the rejection of every policy dedicated to supporting them (such as affirmative actions in public universities, or trans-specific healthcare centres), with many negative sociocultural consequences that are a part of trans necropolitics.

In the Uruguayan context, the Ley Integral Para Personas Trans (Comprehensive Law for Trans People) represents a significant advance in relation to other contexts in the region, in which instituted powers still discuss inalienable aspects of trans travesti peoples’ social life – the Brazilian legal cistem, for example, had a case in discussion for several years in its Supreme Court regarding trans people’s right to use public restrooms. This points to the importance of noting the fragility of these hardly-fought rights, as religion-based conservative attacks are organised, as presented in detail in the report Rights at Risk, published by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID et al., 2017): for instance, the popular consultation convened in Uruguay aiming to revoke the Ley Integral Para Personas Trans showcases the threats from conservative forces interested in the precarisation of trans lives as a political agenda. The country voted in favour of the continuity of the Ley, representing a victory for the Uruguayan trans movements and an opposition to the unjust negotiations around the human rights of trans and travesti peoples. Argentina, a country strongly marked by trans and travesti insurgencies and activisms, was the first one in the region to approve its Ley de Identidad de Género, in 2012. According to Lohana Berkins (2003), since the 90’s there have been travestis demanding visibility to the issues relevant to them in the Argentine context. In her words, the experience of Argentine travestis is marked by imaginaries of ‘mystery, concealment, perversion, contagion’ (Berkins, 2003, p. 67). So, in order to expose an underrepresentation of Argentine travestis as subjects who are creating oppositional practices that act against those depreciative imaginaries, Di Pietro (2016) highlights how the Argentine travesti community in Buenos Aires – most of them racialised and from other parts of the country – through their ‘transversal’ or intersectional positionality not only unveils but also re-configures and decolonises the sexual and racial regulations that organise the social relations of the city and country.

In Di Pietro's interview, Lohana Berkins defends the presence and participation of travestis in other social movements' initiatives to show the ‘transversality of being travesti’ (Di Pietro, 2016, p. 683). As observed in Brazil, where Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus (2013b) notes how transfeminist perspectives allow for articulations within and between trans travesti social movements, feminisms and other movements, Argentine collectives also present many political processes where trans travesti people are publicly involved – the crescent marea verde for bodily autonomy regarding abortion being one notorious example, with claims by trans men and others who do not identify as cisgender women for political memory and presence, when one thinks about abortion rights (Nichols, 2018). Other examples that showcase the collective efforts carried out by Argentine travesti and trans community to built oppositional practices (Di Pietro, 2016) that re-configure and decolonise social relations are the Bachillerato Popular Trans Mocha Celis, an educational initiative mainly for marginalised trans travesti people, and the Archivo de La Memoria Trans, a project and collective that seeks to protect, build and claim an Argentine trans memory with materials obtained by a network of trans activists and allies.

In global perspective, the developments of the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, celebrated every November 20th, demonstrate the profound collective worth attributed by trans movements to remembering and bringing our losses to the public sphere. In honouring the memory of those who walked with us and had their journeys interrupted, we politicise the right to life and self-determination as guiding foundations of our theories and practices. On this regard, Thiago Coacci’s thesis (2018) shares an affectionate and committed analysis of the complexities involved in the formative processes of trans travesti memories in the Brazilian context, and their relationship with the production of data on murders.

Coacci, among other scholars and activists, points out that one of the main challenges in overcoming trans genocide in Brazil is the continuous underreporting of trans deaths. Especially under Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, a consistent number of bills and initiatives showcase how the State has an explicit intention to institutionalise transphobia. Thus, this right-wing federal government not only demonstrates a lack of interest to create public policies that recognise transphobia as a nation-wide problem, but also intend to frame the Brazilian trans and travesti community as non-loyal citizens. As once M. Jacqui. Alexander said (1994, 2006): not just (any)body can be a citizen. The naturalisation of our deaths, the State’s various forms of neglect and attacks against our rights, and the precarious conditions that often accompany our lives, only aggravate the lack of data to properly map the structural, experienced reality.

Against such neglect, initiatives by civil society and trans movements emerge in opposition to the underreporting of murders and the scarcity of official figures. For instance, a report that has been extremely relevant in the Brazilian context is the series about murders and violence against travestis and transsexual people, published annually by ANTRA and IBTE, two trans-led organisations. The latest issue of the report was recently published, on the Brazilian Trans Day of Visibility (January 29th), by Bruna G. Benevides and Sayonara Nogueira (2021). In encompassing information on schooling and the average age of expulsion from schools, for example, they expand data production to situate the data on murders within a broader context that precedes any fatal episodes themselves, considering the unjust pathways that many of us deal with.

Brazil is one of the regional and international contexts where anti-gender agendas are underway,³ and has supplied a variety of unacceptable episodes to this phenomenon. The Brazilian discussions around ‘gender ideology’ (sic)⁴ that garners media attention and votes, supposedly defending ‘well-behaving’, good Christian citizens and their families, the statement of a minister in a caricatural but dangerous defence of blue-and-pink gender binaries for children, bills presented in Legislative Houses against the presence of trans people in professional sports, among other examples of the institutionalisation of transphobia, these elements affirm and consolidate a politics of death (Lima, 2018; Mbembe, 2018) which is present at least since the denunciation of Xica Manicongo to the Inquisition⁵ and bring us to the present situation centuries later.

The unjust negotiations on the humanity of trans, travesti, and non-binary people makes theoretical production one route to build other narratives that recount and imagine the steps taken so far by them/us. With this intention, Helena Vieira and Yuri Fraccaroli (2018) write about the violence instituted against dissidences during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985).

For travestis, the persecutions against them in Brazil can be related to both a moralising gesture (their arrests often justified by charges against public order) and an attempted eugenics, when police officers arrested travesti sex workers, measured their bodies and interrogated them with the purpose of ‘determining how dangerous they could be’ (Vieira & Fraccaroli, 2018, p. 365). In view of such reclaiming of narrative, one that is committed to the historical trajectory of travestis on Brazilian territories, this analysis is concerned with how the State apparatus creates and develops mechanisms of physical and symbolic death, in a politics of enmity and necropolitics that constantly update these historical mechanisms. Although being brutally violated, very little was said about the atrocities committed against our bodies during dictatorships and ‘democracies’ in our region, a situation that demands political reparation at several levels.

One process that involved travestis developing their own historical perspectives is the rethinking and confronting language, on the borders between stigmas and the self-affirmation that subverts them. The intellectual production from transfeminist perspectives in Latin America has sought, from this historical perspective,⁶ to add new meanings and develop ideas that ask societies to consider how the ‘We’ is deemed human as a result of the contrasting precariousness, impoverishment and dehumanisation against the bodies of those recognised as ‘Others’ (Arroyo, 2014; Kilomba, 2008). In turn, especially since the 1990s, the dynamics between trans people’s social movements, the academic production about gender identity and the institutional politics have developed considerably in Brazil, in a co-production between knowledge and the movement of trans people that is studied by Mário de Carvalho (2015) and Thiago Coacci (2018).

Boaventura de Sousa Santos and his sociology of absences (2002, p. 246) aims to explain how ‘what does not exist is in fact actively produced as non-existent, that is – as a non-credible alternative to what exists’. In a similar path, transfeminist studies have questioned the institutional actions in which trans and travesti identities and experiences are not recognised as legitimate ways to exist, proposing transformations in language and in educational, health and law paradigms.

Particularly in debates about gender identities and expressions, bodily diversities and sexual orientations, transfeminists are developing criticisms that demand our presence in territories where we were not previously seen, contributing to such transformations. If our presence in the urban public space almost certainly triggered police violence and abuse in the past (Vieira & Fraccaroli, 2018), today we openly constitute the political fields of academic production and popular representation and demand affirmative actions in universities and public offices that shall dismantle the naturalisations of the genocide of trans and travesti bodies across the continent. Regarding the Brazilian and Argentine contexts, Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus (2013a), Berenice Bento (2014) and Blas Radi and Alejandra Sardá-Chandiramani (2016) attempt to characterise this genocide, marked by the efforts to map violence and murders, which involve complex categories for gender identities, violence and genocide itself, and by the political efforts to confront such realities.

Catherine Walsh, in an interview made by Pablo Quintero (2012), affirms the epistemic agency of Latin America's sociopolitical subjects. For her, it is important to not only emphasise their capacity of them to act on a social level but also demonstrate how other knowledge is being created through their actions. We regard transfeminist theorisations' epistemic agency in a transglobalized world, as elaborated by Bruno Barbosa (2015), as having the potential to destabilise categories, to the extent that it is a ‘movement towards the South’ that is opposed to forms of thinking which produce the non-existence of certain subjects, along with their erasure, exotification and the inferiorization of their knowledges, beings and bodies.

The diffusion of ‘Other’ ways of imagining and thinking might be contrasted against an abstract universalism that disregards experiences and statements that do not abide by a hegemonic, disembodied knowledge production (Bernardino-Costa et al., 2018). In this political, epistemic, ethical project developed by transfeminists with decolonial lenses – as people and groups questioning the conditions that reverberate modern/colonial, dehumanising rationales – we might be often placed in the role of transfeminist kill/joys, as pointed out by T. L. Cowan (2014), deemed as ‘threatening’ to a certain social cohesion in various contexts, including spaces for feminist and anti-racist organisation and political parties. By centring their analysis on feminist spaces and sharing challenges and possibilities to form an ‘assemblage of affects that reorients feminist happiness toward rather than against trans women, and uses anger and love to resist a feminism designed exclusively for non-trans women, not necessarily feminism by all non-trans women’ (p. 502, highlights in the original), T. L. Cowan allows us to expand the scope of these challenges and possibilities to every sphere where we can transform political and affective perspectives. How not to think about Lohana Berkins’ last public words, in her loving travesti fury and let ourselves displace the perspectives that restrict travestis to the fixed places of the ‘clandestine, fetish, and crime’, as noted by Maria Luiza Rovaris Cidade (2016, pp. 50–53):

The time for the revolution is now, because to prisons we shall never return again. I am convinced that the engine of change is love. The love that has been denied to us is our drive to change the world. All the blows and contempt that I suffered are not comparable with the infinite love that surrounds me in this moment. ¡Furia Travesti Siempre! (Wayar, 2018)

As Nilma Lino Gomes (2017) also argues, all knowledge is related to the social actors’ actions which put them into practice. In this sense, we would like to share some transfeminist inflections situated in Latin America, as we bring examples of the displacements in the context of this attempt into an interrogative, decolonial work, in critical dialogue with questions brought up by transfeminist perspectives situated and analysed in diverse space-times, such as Almeida and Vásquez (2010), Alexandre Baril (2016), Thiago Coacci (2014), Espineira and Bourcier (2016) and Preciado (2014).

The epistemic resistance to which this movement contributes affirms the inseparability between reflection and action, therefore, praxis (Freire, 1981). This decolonial praxis claims for a canon that ruptures the hegemony of what González (1988) named as the ‘science’ of eurochristian (white and patriarchal) superiority. Highlighting this decolonial praxis and its inseparability is a relevant contribution to trans studies, a relatively recent field of knowledge: by proposing new epistemic paradigms and representation practices, and taking ‘feminist scholarship in expansive new directions’, trans studies potentially allows for the understanding of complexities on ‘the boundaries of significant forms of difference other than gender, within all of which gender is necessarily implicated’, as noted by Stryker et al. (2008, p. 12). An approach that integrates reflection and action must centre its resources on the most critical and strategic cistemic differences in a given context, considering the contingent, intersectional operation of violences, such as poverty and racism.

What were the consequences of promoting the non-existence of trans, travesti, non-binary people in various spheres? In the face of imposed violences, what theories and practices were developed to demand some level of recognition? When discussing the precariousness of our lives, we move towards a political, collective consciousness. On every opportunity to unveil the oppressive, precarious realities in which we are immersed, we end up producing new ones, despite them being inscribed in cistems, unfortunately deeply defined by its complex and turbulent geopolitics, with permanent crises. In the next section, we will share some aspects that might contribute to the perception of relationships between non-normative bodies, gender identities and expressions, capacities and sexual orientations to the constitution of these turbulent geopolitics, their architectures and infrastructures.

2. Transfeminist geopolitics in turbulent cistems

[Viviane Vergueiro]

One day, at a work meeting about infrastructure and petrochemicals in the state of Bahia, one man in the room comments about his attendance at the inauguration of a certain project in the 70’s. “President Figueiredo or Geisel was there”, he said. The actual presence of this person on the same room as a travesti working as a specialist - I am the travesti, in this case - made me think about the im+possibilities involved in these two space-times: between that young engineer who attended an inauguration celebrated by the military regime and him nowadays, much older, sharing information about the economic situation in Bahia. Would a travesti be able to participate in such an inauguration, in times closer to the Tarantula operation (Cavalcanti et al., 2018) than to any of the trans rights advanced since the 90s? How do the tarantula tentacles affect trans, travesti and non-binary in their pasts, presents and futures? Does she feel welcome to speak now?

Our main intention in this section is to share ideas that connect the theoretical and political contextualisations about gender, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, capacities and bodies – the transfeminist enunciation locus considered on the previous section – to the multiple strategies of resistance, imagination and affection against the extreme effects of infrastructure developments and economic planning⁷ in capitalist, racist, ableist cistems.

After all, trying to imagine how people of trans, travesti, non-binary and non-western gender identities deal with an increasingly multipolarised world (Abdenur & Levaggi, 2018), a world that has been expanding its infrastructure and extreme finance in a historical context of turbulence in capitalist cistems (Hildyard & Sol, 2017) is an important theme not only because of our absence in supposedly-universal projects, feasibility studies and economic policies but also for contributing to critical reflections on the intersectional marginalisations operating in government and corporate, in institutional and non-institutional contexts. Taking the considerations about healthcare for trans people in Latin America noted by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO, 2013, pp. 29–68), what sorts of imagination and speculation are required to collectively struggle against murders, addictions, vulnerabilities and exposures, socioeconomic precarities, missing data, hate and self-hate? How to comprehensively account for the effects of these extreme cistems.

If, during the twentieth century and founded upon on anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQI+struggles, we had important tension and resistance processes involving the borders between the possibile and the impossible, in public and private contexts for one’s body, and how they should behave in each of these spheres – in terms of ethnic-racial, class, gender, gender identity, sexuality positions, among others⁸ – some contemporary concerns suggest transformations in these challenges: in times of infrastructure megaprojects, of militarisation of schools and lives, and the production of neoliberal subjectivities,⁹ what is the viability, or inviability, of existence for intersex bodies, or of trans, travesti, non-binary, muxhe, hijra, two-spirit gender identities/expressions? What are the possibilities and limits in moving through urban and rural spaces, through ‘smart’ cities or small towns, crossing states and borders or working and immigrating to other countries? How about the existence in digital databases, in artificial intelligence architectures in education and healthcare, in facial and body recognitions performed by various cistems, and before institutions and people that utilise them, particularly militarised ones?

These situations require a theoretical dialogue around the category of gender identity, from a global perspective which is related to sociocultural, subjective issues – a dialogue that builds, among others, on the work of Raewyn Connell (2011, 2014), with her ideas on gender and on the importance of Southern perspectives. As a relevant category for transfeminisms, gender identity requires an engagement with epistemic human rights, as proposed by Demétrio and Bensusan (2019), as one dimension of justice for certain groups that takes into account the unsurmountable effects of ciscoloniality on our limited comprehensions about human bodies and sociocultural possibilities across time and space – such marginalisations are also reflected in present struggles for recognition:

Concepts of gender identity vary greatly across the world and a wide range of gender identities and gender expressions exist in all regions as a result of long-established cultures and traditions. Some of the terms used include hijra (Bangladesh, India and Pakistan), travesti (Argentina and Brazil), waria (Indonesia), okule and agule (Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda), muxe (Mexico), fa’afafine (Samoa), kathoey (Thailand) and two-spirit (indigenous North Americans). Some of these and other identities transcend Western concepts of gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation and, depending on the language, the terms “sex”, “gender”, “gender identity” and/or “sexual identity” are not always used or distinguished. Cultures and countries from all over the globe, including Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, India, Nepal, New Zealand and Pakistan — together representing a quarter of the world’s population — recognize in law and in cultural traditions genders other than male and female. (UN, 2018, p. 3)

These sociocultural and subjective traversings, situated in global geopolitical dimensions, should incite the acknowledgement that gender identities and expressions, bodily and sexual diversities are important when thinking about infrastructure or socioeconomic development, a connection that is analysed (with a particular focus on sexuality) in the bulletin edition Sexuality Matters, by Cornwall and Jolly (2006). The very writing about these development-related topics in an article on transfeminist issues is certainly inspired by the ‘cognitive dissonance of fitting [one’s] complex experiences and self-concepts into often simplistic structures and frameworks that denied their subjectivities’ (Scott-Dixon, 2008, p. 37). Rethinking development from a transfeminist perspective, therefore, demands an expansion of horizons so that one may support the lived realities of more people, particularly of those who, being (also) marginalised by their gender identities+expressions, are excluded or restricted from access to socioeconomic resources with dignity, lest we talk about the affective and existential dimensions.

What distrusts and indignations emerge from the contrasts in these boundaries between imagination and reality? If we focus on the trajectories of dissident or non-normative, bodies, gender identities and expressions, what negotiations will be impossible? What statements, what deprivations, what dreams will be out of the realm of feasible, how many of them will be exoticised and misunderstood by schools, health clinics, police stations, financial institutions, legal courts and families?

We would like to suggest that, in resisting against the apocalypses occurring in world-cistems historically advanced by (cis)colonialities (Mignolo, 2011; Vergueiro, 2015), the category of aquilombamento is an important decolonial reference from Black resistances in Brazil, to propose disruptions in the relations with extreme infrastructure, ‘too-big-to-fail’ financial interests, leading to changes in the political choices in the use of strategies and resources, within (what remains of) this world – as Beatriz Nascimento pushes the historical boundaries that constrained the definitions of quilombo and its ‘historical continuity’, through comprehensive studies and imagination (Ratts, 2006, pp. 51–59). And through this process, one may recognise the affections and knowledges that have been distorted and vilified for too long: they are critical elements that call us to incite our imaginations, to collectivise care and to organise resources that ensure survival, well-being and political strategies, at a time when dedicated, well-funded groups work to make our existences unfeasible, as demonstrated by anti-gender movements globally, who use distortions and opportunistic plays with historical stigmas, sometimes in a more caricatural and ridiculous way, sometimes with sophisticated, supposedly scientific or even anti-colonial prose.

In this regard, we would like to share some ideas that have emerged in institutional and non-institutional practices and networks from transfeminist perspectives located in territories that might be conceived as Abya Yala (Celentani, 2014), as the indigenous- and afro-centered Améfrica Ladina of so many celebrated names that must be expelled, for the genocides they participated in (González, 1988; Nunes da Silva, 2019). Within or outside social movements, in artivisms, aparelhas luzias and academias transliterárias,¹⁰ institutional dialogues and representations within the State and academy, political party participation, and others, may we continue our speculating, planning, organising and acting against all necropolitics and enmity produced by their cistems.

3. Transfeminist paths in dialogues with academia, social movements, states and parties

Nosotras las travestis tenemos derecho a leer lo que escriban otras travestis.

Claudia Rodriguez

Perhaps because of our joint attempt to understand these space-times as moments of impossibilities and also of possibilities, in epistemic, methodological and spiritual terms, as well as a specific political economy, it seems important to emphasise the joy and responsibility of sharing projects and ideas towards other worlds, other kinds of relationship and affection with so many people (many of them already cited here). This is a crucial element in the face of so many cistemic spaces where hierarchies abound, between important and unimportant bodies; about those able or unable to generate ideas, knowledge and values; those humanised or invisible/exotic. May we, in these words written between transitionings, returnings and intersectional interweavings (Silva Santana, 2017), share and celebrate some pathways that inspire and strengthen what already exists in this sense, and what may exist soon.

The incipient inflections brought about in these words become materialised to the extent that the trans, travesti, non-binary movements advance forms of radical thinking and acting. Excluded from the right to education, they have developed pedagogical processes on various territories of large urban centres. Their own pedagogies, crafted within communities, coexisting with equals.

In developing the political perceptions that connect dehumanisation processes with the complete neglect of public policies, they organised themselves to interrogate social movements, institutions, schools, work environments and the very civilisational framework which produces them as uncivilised. They have opposed the extermination mechanisms that instituted a communication strategy, for instance, ‘with a bias to discriminate, discipline, regulate, and ensure that travestis are perceived as “too dangerous” to live in Brazilian society’ (Rodrigues, 2019). In response, they affirmed the travesti identity as a foundational element of political consciousness regarding the politics of death to which they were subjected, calling into question the white-European–Christian civilisatory framework that has supported, for centuries, the spurious equation [dissident sex+gender+sexuality]=[inferior, uncivilised being].

In this sense, within healthcare-related contexts, when abused by pathologising narratives and practices from professionals, they reaffirmed a commitment to humanisation through personal strategies and institutional politics to advocate for the right to comprehensive healthcare that includes accessible and depathologised trans-specific care, in this way deconstructing the cisnormative gazes that are exhaustingly fixated on hormones and surgeries. They become political subjects as insurgencies against the objectification of their bodies and rationalities. Trans, travesti, non-binary movements setting agendas for discussion, showing dissatisfaction with assistentialist and benevolent framings, but particularly in the contexts of greatest vulnerability to autonomy, such as childhood and adolescence (Favero & Machado, 2019). In claiming themselves as legal, political and social subjects, they evoke the possibility of ‘Other’ ways of doing and thinking in the region (Arroyo, 2014).

Due to resource constraints in general (Howe et al., 2017), we note that the potentialities of sociocultural change that transfeminist perspectives have will be dependent on the multiple inter-movement solidarities and joint advocacy efforts to be effected; in particular, we celebrate those who have been closer to trans, travesti, non-binary communities, such as LGB movements, research institutions dedicated to gender and sexuality, feminist movements and institutions, leftist political parties, among others. These solidarities and joint efforts also need to be considered from a regional perspective that promotes the sharing of experiences between our lived Amefrican contexts, from trans and intersex depathologisation to feminist self-care, among so many other themes, as invaluable seeds for other space-times in which we have access to adequate and competent healthcare.

In turn, the challenge of producing data and information which overcomes the current cistemic precariousness and lack of interest is critical, as a possibility to respond to the distrust we face as community, and an integral piece to demand policies and investments on the dignity and well-being of trans, travesti and non-binary people. Regarding healthcare, there are significant knowledge gaps that need to be addressed (PAHO, 2013, pp. 38–40).

Therefore, thinking about ‘visibility’, so to speak, should not limit itself to emerging as ‘relevant’ to the hegemonic frameworks but shall demand a profound decolonial inflection on the institutional and environmental political economy of this data production, constituted by socioeconomic asymmetries and hierarchies between areas of knowledge and institutions, by discrimination on individual levels, etc., in our limitations to rethink affections, sensibilities, encounters, trusts and lovers. What changes between us, when the energy that moves us, even in the face of these cistems, is love? Without any definitive answers, we believe that Lohana Berkins is one regional example (along with so many others) that lovely shimmers our decolonial furies, ancestrally grounding our longings for justice.

This text was written in the longing for proximity amidst so many distances, in the indignation of absurd votes and threats of anti-gender politicians, and in the incessant hope that all our tears are dews towards the next dawns to come. Vamos por todo, against all coloniality and hierarchy, so that all of the territories in this so-called Latin America shall be transfeminist, and collectively develop the means to achieve well-being and autonomy for all.

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Notes

1 This is a perception closely related to the international monitoring of murders of people of trans, travesti and other non-cis gender identities, in which Brazil appears as an isolated leader in several years, followed by Mexico. There are several methodological and epistemic considerations to be made about this relationship between data production and the contexts of violence (Balzer & Berredo, 2016); however, it is worth mentioning how such a relationship is both an illustration of cissexist/transphobic violence and of the capacities for organization and resistance of trans, travesti, non-binary communities, which include the production of data and information.

2 ANTRA has conducted mappings of trans people participating in Brazilian elections; see, for example, ANTRA (2020).

3 An overview of these agendas is presented in an issue of Revista Psicologia Política, organized by Corrêa and Prado (2018), as well as in the Rights at Risk report previously cited (AWID et al., 2017).

4 On some implications of the discursive construction of this ‘gender ideology’, see Nascimento (2019).

5 On the history of Xica Manicongo, Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus (2019) is a crossing wisdom against christian inquisitorial powers: ‘A 20th-century travesti was needed for Xica to be named in the 21st century. Crossing’. We hope that these words, all that we argue here, are also crossings to other possible names, languages and existences.

6 Expanded, for example, in the sense of forming solidarities and alliances with trans men and transmasculine people, mutually strengthening ourselves as movements and thoughts.

7 Hildyard and Sol (2017, p. 4), mainly concerned with the contemporary creation of infrastructural ‘mega-corridors’, offer a powerful critique of an age of ‘extreme infrastructure’ founded upon not only the scale of infrastructure projects, but their reliance on extreme forms of extraction, finance and politics. From our transfeminist standpoint, we are concerned with the implications of such extreme agendas to trans, travesti, non-binary, non-western gender identities, given their intersectional erasure and marginalization in the implementation of these projects.

8 These intersectional elements are complexities that, for instance, lead to dialogues with the concerns raised by Susan Moller Okin (2008) and Carole Pateman (2013) about the ‘context of specific interpretations of the 'public' and the “'private”’ (p. 65).

9 Puar's (2017) reflections on transnationalism are an important contribution to exercise criticism and caution, when thinking about the struggles related to gender identities and their potential cooptation by neoliberal regimes of ‘capacitation’ and ‘rehabilitation’ – with hierarchical consequences, intra- and inter-communities.

10 Reference to some initiatives that promote reflections and actions in transforming power relations and dealing with critical intersectional issues: Aparelha Luzia is an urban quilombo, founded by Erica Malunguinho, a Black trans woman, in the city of São Paulo; Casa Amor is a cultural and community center for LGBTI people in Aracaju, founded by Linda Brasil, a white trans woman; and Academia Transliterária is a collective of artists from Minas Gerais state that investigates strategies, aesthetics and artistic languages for the diffusion and protagonism of trans and marginalized art and culture.