Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

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 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 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. 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