The political mediation of Argentina's gender identity law: LGBT activism and rights innovation

ABSTRACT

In 2012, Argentina enacted the most progressive gender identity rights law in the world, permitting trans people to change their legal name and gender marker without medical or judicial scrutiny and mandating full coverage of related medical procedures. Using the political mediation framework to illuminate the role of domestic activists in forging new rights, I trace the path of the bill through the policymaking process as two different LGBT coalitions pushed for its passage. I show that, in a favorable political context, the more institutionalized group played a major role in getting the issue on the agenda, while a more radical challenger coalition was crucial in developing and advancing the ground-breaking content. United together, the movement strategically dampened media coverage to have an outsize impact on passage. This case study sheds light on the emergence of LGBT rights norms and suggests ways to adapt the political mediation framework outside the United States context.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John Krinsky, Rachel Brown, members of the Politics and Protest Workshop at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the two anonymous Journal of Human Rights reviewers for their careful readings and helpful suggestions. I am also indebted to all of the activists in Argentina who contributed their time and knowledge in personal interviews and to the many friends there who facilitated my research, with particular thanks to María Pía Poveda for her tireless support and willingness to answer my endless questions.

Notes

1. Following Argentine activists and scholars, I use the term trans people in this article to encompass transgender, transsexual, and travesti identities in Argentina. The term travesti in Argentina means a person assigned male at birth who identifies with some form of femininity, although a travesti may or may not undertake any body modification or identify as female; the identity is a politicized one that carries associations with sex work and precarity (see, e.g., Cabral and Viturro 2006).

2. See http://www.coe.int/t/Commissioner/Source/LGBT/LGBTStudy2011_en.pdf.

3. As early as 1999, a bill was introduced by several legislators to allow for gender marker changes on documentation; it would have required expert testimony and previous surgery (Dandan 2000). The FALGBT bill was the first activist-generated gender identity bill.

4. As Cabral (2013) pointed out, however, this judgment was grounded in the woman's convincing feminine appearance: Although she had not undergone genital surgery, she had received hormone treatment, breast implants, and hip augmentation, rendering her outward appearance congruous with her female gender identity (and rendering her sterile). As noted above, this sort of standard erects a high barrier for access, particularly for members of an economically marginalized community.

5. Data obtained from the Women in National Parliaments database at http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif-arc.htm.

6. The one noteworthy change was the addition of a requirement for judicial review of documentation change for youths under the age of 18, which was amended to the bill in the full Chamber of Deputies debate.

7. Both movement-backed bills were more trans-friendly than the two legislator-driven bills, which required trans people to provide proof of the incongruity between their sex and gender, whether in the form of surgery or other evidence, which would be evaluated by the civil registry; they also made no mention of health care. All of the bills can be accessed online at http://www.diputados.gov.ar/comisiones/permanentes/clgeneral/reuniones/partes/parte.html?id_reunion = 3222.

8. The FALGBT's bill retained language requiring fixity in the identity of those who would be subject to the law: “every person who feels and expresses in a public, stable and permanent way that they belong to a different gender from that which society conventionally assigns to their biological sex at birth” (Article 2).

9. Sixty-five deputies were absent for the lower chamber vote and 16 senators were absent from the upper chamber vote. The absent legislators included Liliana Negre de Alonso, who had led the strenuous opposition to the marriage equality bill.

10. LexisNexis searches by the author produced one article on gender identity and twenty-four on marriage equality using multiple search terms to capture all relevant articles; LexisNexis does not record every La Nación article, but a web search of the newspaper turns up only two other articles on gender identity and many more on marriage equality.

11. See Tabbush et al. (2016) for a more thorough exploration of this question.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture, and Society (2014-15).

Notes on contributors

Julie Hollar

Julie Hollar holds a PhD in political science from the CUNY Graduate Center and currently teaches at Hunter College. Her research interests include social movements, discourse, and policy, with a particular interest in LGBT rights movements in the United States and Argentina.