Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Abstract

Latin American trans* masculine individuals have often been erased from public discourse, both within their societies and within trans studies. On the one hand, within the region, it is frequent to hear that trans* masculinities are invisible. This invisibility or, rather, this erasure of our subjectivities, is directly related to the fact that trans* masculine identities are often not recognized as such and are thus disregarded (Álvarez Broz 2017; Fernández Romero, Torres, and Lenzi 2021). This situation can be attributed both to anti-trans discourses from conservative and progressive sectors, including trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and to some sectors that consider themselves allies of a “trans* movement” yet do not address its plurality. Cissexist historical narratives have often also overlooked certain aspects of our histories that are crucial for understanding our biographies and our community-building and political practices.Within trans* studies, Latin American trans* masculinities have also tended to fall through the cracks. On the one hand, as a whole, trans* studies leans global North–centric (Rizki 2019), similar to queer, gay, and lesbian studies (Pérez and Radi 2019). Moreover, work on trans* in Latin America from both within and outside the region usually focuses on travestis and trans women (Radi 2018, 2019; Rizki 2019). Trans* masculine contributions to Latin American trans* rights movements have also been undervalued and at times even unacknowledged.In this article, we focus on South American trans* masculine existence, especially in the continent's southern region. We begin by recuperating certain historical subjects who are often read by historians through a cissexist framework as examples of “strategic transvestism,” a category that suggests that masculine “transvestism” was employed as a ruse to gain upward social mobility.1 We attend instead to these subjects' narratives, histories, and first-person accounts, suggesting that, rather than examples of strategic transvestism, these subjects are of interest to a broader trans* masculine archive. Second, we highlight the narratives, practices, and experiences of individuals who transitioned during or soon after the region's dictatorial period in the twentieth century. In doing so, we suggest differences in the conditions of possibility for the emergence of trans* masculine communities and subjectivities, in departure from the contouring force of US national histories. Finally, we underscore the work of South American trans* masculine activists from the 1990s to the present, calling attention to their contributions on a local and global scale. Throughout the piece, we draw largely from the research of some of the region's many trans* masculine scholars who have emerged over the past decades.There are a number of historical archives, notary acts, biographies, and memoirs—to some extent fictionalized—from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth that suggest the existence of people in Latin America who, though assigned female at birth, lived most or all of their lives self-identified as men, such as Enrique Faver, Amelio Robles Ávila, Antonio Ytá, and Raúl Suárez. These cases have been studied and classified by historians and researchers as women who posed as men or as female husbands despite the fact that one might, from a close analysis of the archive, read these subjects as espousing identifications or practices we might consider trans* in the present (Halberstam 1998).In the specific case of South America, many subjects who might be understood today as trans* masculinities, or at least as individuals assigned female at birth who lived as men for the majority or entirety of their lives, have later been classified through a cissexist framework as “women who impersonated men” (examples of this are Abercrombie 2008; González Pagés 2012). These categories have reinforced the central premise of cissexism, which views trans* persons as less “real” and “authentic” than their cis counterparts (Cabral 2009; Radi 2015). Especially in recent scholarship on the nineteenth century, masculine “transvestism” has been considered a strategy used to achieve a kind of upward social mobility. Such an interpretation also contributes to denying these subjects' agency.Although it could be problematic to associate these individuals with trans* masculinity during a time when such a category did not yet exist, it is also true that those who wrote or interpreted these stories did not hesitate to label these subjects—who were not allowed to name themselves—as imposters (Martínez 2017; Skidmore 2017; Simonetto 2021). As mentioned above, “strategic transvestism” is one of the most frequent ways of referring to those who might today be named or understood as trans* masculinities, given that most historians interpret their “passing as the opposite sex” as a means to achieve power or reap other benefits. In contrast, cultural critics such as Juliana Martínez (2017) reconstruct and criticize this cissexist reading of Faver's life. Following Martínez and reading against the archival grain, we can prioritize these persons' scarce first-person testimonies and how they name themselves (Skidmore 2017) to narrate their histories and recover their trajectories. This is the approach also espoused by Marta V. Vicente (2021), who emphasizes the importance of using individuals' own self-descriptors, while also upholding the utility of terms such as trans*, to encompass the experience of not living in one's assigned gender across history. In this manner, the alleged nonexistence of trans* masculine histories in South America—or, at best, their limited existence—is strongly linked to the denial of these individuals' practices, narratives, and lived experiences of masculinities.The first-person narratives and voices of these men appear in the archive, articulating experiences of their lives and desires that contrast with how they are produced, regulated, and inscribed within discourses of power by dominant institutions such as the tabloid press or historiography (Disalvo 2020). Antonio Ytá, whose case has been addressed by Thomas Abercrombie (2008: 6), was “unmasked” (in Abercrombie's terms) and reported by his wife in 1803 for presumably tricking her, as he was actually “a woman dressed as a man.” Yet if we look at the sources, we can see that Antonio had not only served as governor of a town in Moxos, Bolivia, while living as a man under that same name; as Antonio himself narrates, he lived as male for a decade until his wife's accusation led him to be examined by the town's doctor and surgeon. Supplementing his first-person account, his mother also provided documents and statements that backed Ytá’s position, showing that her son had long expressed, in Abercrombie's terms, a “heterosexual male sexuality” and a “convincingly natural” masculinity (13). If we read Antonio's and his mother's testimonies without cissexist bias, we can claim that Antonio was living as a man many years before any institutional position of power was available to him. Thus, although we cannot elaborate on this further here, there are elements of his account that suggest an alternative reading that does not render him a case of “strategic transvestism.”Another interesting case is that of Raúl Luis Suárez, who obtained his national identification documents in Argentina in the 1910s in which he was officially recognized as a male citizen. As historian Patricio Simonetto (2021) reconstructs, Luis Suárez married Amalia Gómez in 1912 and lived his whole life as a man, even moving through high society and holding prestigious jobs as customs officer. In 1930 his “true sex” (Skidmore 2017) was discovered by doctors after his hospitalization and subsequent death. The press covered the story as “the extraordinary case of [R——] Suárez who pretended to be a man for 25 years” (Caras & caretas1930; former legal name omitted here). Previously, Arturo de Aragón had also been classified by the same magazine as a case of a “mujer-hombre” (woman-man; Caras & caretas 1906). Like Raúl Luis, Arturo lived much of his life as a man who was known for “dressing well” and for having had “the opportunity to be mixed up in more than one amorous situation with women” (J. Fernández 2012: 114). Yet the magazine's insistence on the fraudulent nature of both of their masculinities reinscribes Raúl Luis and Arturo within discourses of fraud and deception, simultaneously sensationalizing and criminalizing their expressions of masculinity. It also denies the agency they exhibited in constructing various practices and experiences of masculinities.The stories of Antonio, Raúl, and Arturo are not isolated incidents: they are part of a broader genealogy of what we might read as trans* masculine narratives, stories, and histories that have been interpreted through a cissexist viewpoint that overlooks the first-person accounts present in most sources. This manner of narrating these subjects' lives is not only present in writings on the nineteenth or early twentieth century, but it has also persisted when referring to periods when categories such as transexual or transgénero had already been adopted by trans* masculine communities. That is to say, even self-identification with trans, transgender, or transexual manhood or masculinity has been mostly disregarded by the press (Disalvo 2020) and by some segments of feminist and LGBTQ+ activism, even in the present. In parallel, late twentieth-century trans* masculine communities and activism have tended to be overlooked when tracing the histories of trans* communities in South America, even in the face of a current increase in interest in the topic. In the following section, we highlight some potential milestones in a trans* masculine genealogy of the region.The temporality of trans* masculine communities varies between and across regions shaped in part by political and historical conditions. In the United States and Canada, the 1970s saw a growth in FTM communities, with the emergence of the first transexual male groups and publications, led for example by Rupert Raj in Toronto or Lou Sullivan in San Francisco (Stryker 2008). In contrast to the United States and Canada, a large part of Latin America was controlled by military dictatorships between the 1960s and 1980s, which established particular conditions of possibility for medical transitions, community building, and political activism. These dictatorships, while at times networked, had uneven national effects on medical transition. For example, in Chile, the government of dictator Augusto Pinochet allowed some individuals to undergo surgical interventions and to obtain legal gender recognition beginning in the 1970s; Fernanda Carvajal (2018) holds that Chilean authorities might have been favorable toward these procedures, as they served to realign or “correct” what the authoritarian regime designated as “deviant bodies” within a conservative moral order. In contrast, in other countries such as Argentina and Brazil, genital reassignment surgeries were illicit under dictatorial governments. Specifically, in Brazil, there existed a general prohibition against what was considered by the military government to be “mutilation” (Neves 2016: 167). In Argentina during this period, such operations were forbidden under National Law No. 17,132 unless authorized by a judge.This context similarly framed some of the first recorded transitions of men who have self-identified as transexual or trans. In Brazil João W. Nery underwent clandestine gender-related surgeries in 1977 during the Brazilian dictatorship when these operations were illegal. He also acquired male documentation during this time by claiming at a civil registry office that his birth had never been registered as a child. This change in documentation deeply affected his professional life, however: he lost the ability to use his professional degree as a psychologist specialized in gender and sexuality, as it was issued under his previous name, and during the dictatorship there was no legal recourse to change the legal name on his degree (Nery 2011). In mid-1980s Argentina Eugenio Talbot Wright began transitioning socially and medically as a teenager. Although the country's most recent dictatorship had ended in 1983, individuals considered to be sexual or gender deviants continued to suffer harsh persecution at the hands of the police. Talbot Wright reports being frequently arrested during police raids of gay bars for the misdemeanor of dressing as the “opposite sex” (Oliva 2020). Similar regulations were still in force throughout the country until the 1990s and 2000s, although the effects of such regulations have been studied only for trans women and travestis (for example, Berkins and J. Fernández 2013).Travel and the transnational circulation of knowledge was also important in both individuals' lives. Nery (2011) recounts having learned about transsexual surgeries on a trip to France, where he read about them by chance in a medical journal he found in a bookstore. Talbot Wright traveled to Chile for gender-related operations, which was also a common practice among trans women to circumvent the requirement for judicial authorization in Argentina. He later attended a university in Cuba, “the ideal for my parents, the socialist country,” which he describes as a transphobic society but “not with me, because I'd had surgery and had been ‘cured’” (Oliva 2020). According to widespread popular and medical beliefs at the time, transsexuality could be “cured” through surgical interventions to normalize deviant and pathological corporalities.We know these details through these individuals' later accounts of their own lives, as at the time of their medical interventions they did not widely publicize their trans* status. Both came forth publicly in the 2010s during a time when community activism generated more visibility and rights for trans individuals. Nery anonymously published his autobiography Erro de pessoa: Joana ou João (Wrong Person: Joana or João) in 1984. He became visibly trans and an active member of the trans* masculine community only in 2011, when he published an updated version of his 1984 memoir, this time under his own name: Viagem solitária: Memórias de um transexual trinta anos depois (Solitary Journey: Memoir of a Transexual Thirty Years Later). In Talbot Wright's case, as the son of a desaparecido (a political activist kidnapped, tortured, and exterminated by the dictatorial government), he had participated in anti-genocide human rights activism starting in the 1990s, though he experienced resistance from some of the relatives of desaparecidos2 who considered his presence shameful. In the late 2010s he began to share his story with the press and to participate more visibly in trans* activism.In parallel to these individuals' lives, trans* masculine communities had slowly begun to flourish in some Latin American countries around the turn of the century. Most of the organized trans* masculine groups in the region emerged from the 2010s onward; however, transexual and transgender male activism began to develop in the 1990s within broader organizations. In Argentina Ivo Schuster was part of the country's first transexual organization, TRANSDEVI—Transexuales por el Derecho a la Vida y a la Identidad (Transexuals for the Right to Life and Identity) (see TRANSDEVI 1994). Founded in 1991, this organization advocated for legal gender recognition and for “sex change” surgeries within the country (Butierrez 2021). A few years later, also in Argentina, individuals who identified with transgender masculinity or manhood—including Mauro Cabral Grinspan, whose later career we discuss below—joined lesbian and bisexual activists to create a group called Las Iguanas. They printed a bulletin between 1998 and 1999 in which transgender issues figured prominently, including several articles by transgéneros masculinos and references to North American authors such as Leslie Feinberg and Aaron Devor. This publication contains some of the first recorded uses of the words transgénero and trans in Argentina, which were more broadly adopted by trans* feminine communities only in the early 2000s; up until then, the most common terms in circulation were transexual and travesti.In the twenty-first century, specifically trans* masculine organizations began to flourish in South America. For example, Entre-Tránsitos was created in Colombia in 2009; in Argentina, Hombres Trans Argentinos (HTA) was founded in 2010, and one year later, the Asociación de Travestis, Transexuales y Transgéneros de Argentina (ATTTA) created a dedicated space for trans men (ATTTA Hombres Trans); while in Brazil, the Associação Brasileira de Homens Trans (ABHT) and the Instituto Brasileiro de Transmasculinidades (IBRAT) were established between 2012 and 2013. However, many trans male activists from the region are also notorious for advocacy work that reaches across communities and weaves together different geographic scales.In Chile, for instance, in 2005 Andrés Rivera Duarte founded OTD, Organización de Transexuales por la Dignidad de la Diversidad (Transexual Organization for the Dignity of Diversity), an organization devoted broadly to trans* rights. The OTD worked locally toward achieving human rights for all transexual individuals, and in 2009 it became the first trans* organization to gain consultative status—a status granted to nongovernmental organizations that allows them to have a voice within major global organizations—with the Organization of American States (CLAM 2010). In Argentina the aforementioned Mauro Cabral Grinspan was already involved in regional and global advocacy in the early 2000s, focusing on trans* and intersex issues. He contributed toward key changes in the international human rights system. For example, in 2007 he was one of the original signatories of the Yogyakarta Principles, which are a series of statements on the application of international human rights law to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. Later, in 2009 he cofounded the New York–based organization GATE (initially Global Action for Trans* Equality, now called Trans, Gender Diverse and Intersex Advocacy in Action). Alongside other organizations, GATE was one of the main driving forces behind the revision of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, which removed trans* identities from the Chapter on Mental and Behavioral Disorders (Suess Schwend 2020).These activists and organizations had a local as well as a global impact. In Chile the OTD helped achieve some of the first instances of legal gender recognition without genital reassignment. In Argentina the Yogyakarta Principles were later a key precedent for the country's Gender Identity Law (National Law No. 26,743; 2012), which even a decade later continues to be considered cutting-edge, given that it grants all individuals the right to their gender identity, including depathologized, cost-free access to legal gender recognition and/or transitional health care. Although trans women and travestis are most often credited for achieving this law, Cabral Grinspan and other trans men such as philosopher Blas Radi, lawyer Taddeo C.C., and activist Fernando Rodríguez from HTA played crucial roles and were integral to the law's passage.Also in Argentina, trans men played a leading role in the struggle for trans* reproductive rights and justice. Beginning in the 2010s several activists such as Radi, Francisco Sfeir, and Tomás Mascolo, and organizations such as the Frente de Trans Masculinidades, raised their voices for the inclusion of trans* masculine individuals within the abortion rights movement, which rose in prominence until the National Congress passed a bill broadening termination rights in 2020 (Fernández Romero 2021). Although they did not achieve their goal of being fully included within negotiations around the issue, they succeeded in expanding the language of the bill to include all “persons with the capacity to gestate” in addition to “women” (National Law no. 27,610). In parallel, other trans men sought to make visible the obstacles they encountered in accessing assisted reproductive technologies or pregnancy health care (Mendieta and Vidal-Ortiz 2021).In our home country, Argentina, it is still common to hear that trans* masculinity is a “new” phenomenon, with at most a single decade of history. But as this piece has suggested, individuals who identify with trans, transgénero, or transexual masculinity have existed in South America for at least half a century, and people assigned female at birth have lived in the region as men for longer. That is why thorough research into archives is needed to brush conventional histories against the grain, to expose their cissexist bias, and to enable new narratives of trans* people's lives and deeds in the past. In doing so, the erasure of their experiences will no longer be reproduced in and by historical accounts. Yet our call for anti-cisnormative readings of trans* masculine lives extends beyond historical accounts and, indeed, beyond academic scholarship. The urgency of this task materializes in the story of a young Argentinian trans man, Tehuel de la Torre. After his disappearance in early 2021, parts of the press and some feminist organizations have framed the situation as a case of violence against women, or even as a femicide, despite repeated demands from the trans* masculine community to respect his gender and find him alive. This constitutes an example of the physical, discursive, and epistemological violence that often renders trans* masculine lives unlivable, ungrievable, and unimaginable.Although the brevity of this article has allowed us to explore only a few examples of trans masculine existence in a limited number of South American countries, we also hope this brief overview serves as an indication of how the temporalities, spatialities, and modalities of trans masculine existence are contingent on local and regional historical, cultural, and political conditions. Without denying the possible similarities comparative research may find, we believe it is necessary to call into question the universality of trans* masculine genealogies drawn from global North positions. A deeper exploration of South American trans* masculine politics would also show how its agenda is rooted in specific circumstances, like any trans* movement. For example, as we show elsewhere (Fernández Romero 2021; Mendieta and Vidal-Ortiz 2021), the strong presence of trans* masculine activists in Argentina's reproductive rights movements might not have been possible if the country had not depathologized trans* identities, thus eliminating forced sterilization. Depathologization itself might not have been a goal of the country's trans* movement if its health system had resembled the US privatized health-care system, where the loss of insurance coverage for gender affirmative procedures is a concern. Again, this line of research could serve to provincialize analyses of global North trans* masculine agendas, interrogating their own conditions of possibility.Finally, we have highlighted how South American trans men (and trans* communities in general) not only have been on the receiving end of influences from the global North but also have made key contributions in arenas such as international human rights law and the global field of trans* health. The transnational circulation of individuals, ideas, and activist practices within the region and beyond has played a key role in trans* masculine subjectivities and politics and thus requires further attention.