Travesti (gender identity)
The term travesti is used in Latin America to designate people who were assigned male at birth and develop a feminine gender identity. Other terms have been invented and are used in South America in an attempt to further distinguish it from cross-dressing, drag, and pathologizing connotations. In Spain, the term was used in a similar way during the Franco era, but it was replaced with the advent of the medical model of transsexuality in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in order to rule out negative stereotypes. The arrival of these concepts occurred later in Latin America than in Europe, so the concept of travesti lasted, with various connotations.
The word "travesti", originally pejorative in nature, was reappropriated by Peruvian, Brazilian and Argentine activists, as it has a regional specificity that combines a generalized condition of social vulnerability, an association with sex work, the exclusion of basic rights and its recognition as a non-binary and political identity.
Travestis not only dress contrary to their assigned sex, but also adopt female names and pronouns and often undergo cosmetic practices, hormone replacement therapy, filler injections and cosmetic surgeries to obtain female body features, although generally without modifying their genitalia nor considering themselves as women. The travesti population has historically been socially vulnerable and criminalized, subjected to social exclusion and structural violence, with discrimination, harassment, arbitrary detentions, torture and murder being commonplace throughout Latin America. As a result, most travestis resort to prostitution as their only source of income, which in turn, plays an important role in their identity.
Travesti identities are heterogeneous and multiple, so it is difficult to reduce them to universal explanations. They have been studied by various disciplines, especially anthropology, which has extensively documented the phenomenon in both classical and more recent ethnographies. Researchers have generally proposed one of three main hypotheses to define travestis: that they constitute a "third gender", that they reinforce the gender binarism of their society, or that they actually deconstruct the category of gender altogether. Although it is a concept widely used in Latin America, the definition of travesti is controversial, and it is still regarded as a transphobic slur depending on the context. Very similar groups exist across the region, with names such as vestidas, maricón, cochón, joto, marica, pájara, traveca and loca, among others.
Notable travesti rights activists include Argentines Lohana Berkins, Claudia Pía Baudracco, Diana Sacayán, Marlene Wayar and Susy Shock; Erika Hilton from Brazil and Yren Rotela from Paraguay.
Terminology
Although the use of the term travestismo is still common in Spanish, some contemporary authors reject it to avoid confusion with the practice of cross-dressing, as well as the use of the suffix -ism, which comes from the medical sciences and is considered pathologizing. In response to this, the use of the terms travestilidade or travestilidad has become widespread in Brazilian academic literature since the 2000s and has been adopted by some Spanish-speaking authors, while others have opted for the words travestidad, or transvestividad. In the same way, the words travestimento and travestimiento are used as an alternative to "transvestism", but to designate transformistas. The Hispanicism travestism is sometimes seen in articles in English about the topic, especially by South American authors.The use of the term travesti meaning cross-dresser was already common in French in the early 19th century, from where it was imported into Portuguese with the same meaning. It precedes that of "transgender" in the region, and its differentiation from the notions of "transsexual" and "trans woman" is complex and can vary depending on the context, ranging from considering it a regional equivalent to a unique identity. The original use of the word refers to the act of cross-dressing and became extended in the 1960s to refer to individuals who dressed as women as a performance or in their day-to-day lives.
Travestis not only choose to dress contrary to their assigned sex, but also adopt female names and pronouns and often undergo cosmetic practices, hormone replacement therapy, filler injections and cosmetic surgeries to obtain female body features, although generally without modifying their genitals or considering themselves women. As such, they may be described as a transfeminine gender identity and have been considered a regional equivalent to the notion of "pre-op transsexual".
After a long period of criminalization, "sexual deviations" became an object of study in the medical and sexual sciences, which established the different forms of deviation. Between 1870 and 1920, a large amount of research was produced about people who cross-dressed or wished to adopt the role assigned to the opposite sex. In 1910, the renowned German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld used the term transvestite, in his text Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, to describe "people who feel a compulsion to wear clothes of the opposite sex" and rejected the idea that they were a variant of homosexuality, which at that time was a very widespread conception within sexology. Between 1920 and 1950, the terms transvestism and eonism were incorporated into the scientific literature, although generally these reports only supplemented those of previous years.
During the 1950s, the term transsexual—first used by American sexologist David Oliver Cauldwell—gained relevance at the same time that sexual identity clinics and sex change surgery emerged. This caused transvestism to be put aside as a topic of medical interest in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The term transgender was popularized by American activist Virginia Prince in the late 1960s to designate those who transgressed gender norms but did not identify with the travesti or transsexual categories, and by the 1980s its widespread use in core countries was established. However, the "trans" and "transgender" categories cannot be easily translated outside core countries due to the complexity of practices they encompass. The use of the term travesti precedes theirs in Latin America, and their differentiation is complex and can vary depending on the context. Scholar Cole Rizki pointed out that "trans and travesti identifications are constantly shifting and should not be understood as mutually exclusive. The tensions between trans and travesti as identificatory categories are often untranslatable, leading us to ask what sorts of limitations and possibilities are embedded within the terms' distinctions and critical affinities."
Despite being an emic concept widely used throughout the region, the definition of travesti is a source of controversy because it refers to heterogeneous and multiple identities, making it paradoxical to reduce the terms to universal explanations. Groups very similar to travestis exist across Latin America, with names such as maricón, cochón, joto, marica, pájara,
loca, among others. Writing for the Latin American Research Review in 2020, Joseph M. Pierce claimed that in Hispanic American countries, "as a general category, transgénero or the more popular trans refers to people who make identitarian, corporeal, and social efforts to live as members of the gender that differs from the normative sex that they were assigned at birth." Comparing it to the term travesti, he noted that:
in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, refers most frequently to people assigned male sex at birth and who feminize their bodies, dress, and behavior; prefer feminine pronouns and forms of address; and often make significant bodily transformations by injecting silicone or taking hormonal treatments but do not necessarily seek sex-reassignment surgery. ... the specific Latin American conceptual and identity marker travesti involves gender variance but not always gendered difference. While transgender, trans, and transsexual are terms that refer to changing gender and sex through legal, corporeal, or social mechanisms, a travesti may have been assigned "male" at birth but does not necessarily consider herself a woman. For many travestis the term transgender depoliticizes a violent history of social and economic marginalization. The term travesti, in contrast, retains this class difference and popular resonance, and is thus a political, rather than a psychological, or even corporeal identification.
According to Brazilian activist Amara Moira, the terms trans woman and travesti are synonymous, with many people using the former to avoid the negative connotations associated with the latter. The imposition of the transgender and transvestite categories by Anglo-American academics over travesti identities has been considered by some to be colonizing and westernizing in nature and has been met with resistance by the community. Originally used colloquially as a pejorative term, the travesti category has been reappropriated by Brazilian, Peruvian and especially Argentine activists since the 1990s, as it has a regional specificity that combines a generalized condition of social vulnerability, an association with sex work, the exclusion of basic rights and its recognition as a non-binary and political identity.
As they are stigmatized, excluded from the educational and labor system and reified as objects of theoretical criticism or media consumption, one of the main struggles of travesti activism since its emergence in the 1990s was the creation of their own political subjectivities. Argentine travesti activist Lohana Berkins pointed out in 2006:
We hold the travesti identity not only by resorting to linguistic regionalism, but also by circumstances and characteristics that make travestism a different phenomenon from North American and European transgenderism. In the first place, we travestis live different circumstances compared to those experienced by many transgenders from other countries, who have the objective of rearranging themselves in the binary logic as women or men. A large part of Latin American travestis claim the option of occupying a position outside of binarism and it is our objective to destabilize the male and female categories. Second, the word transgenderism originated from theoretical works developed within the framework of the North American academy. In contrast, the term travesti in Latin America comes from medicine and has been appropriated, reworked and embodied by travestis to call themselves. This is the term in which we recognize ourselves and that we choose to construct ourselves as subjects of rights. The term "travesti" has been and continues to be used as a synonym for AIDS, thief, scandalous, infected, marginal. We decided to give new meanings to the word travesti and link it with struggle, resistance, dignity and happiness.
Despite its reappropriation by some as a political identity, in some places travesti is still regarded as a transphobic slur, often used to invalidate people who prefer the terms transsexual or transgender. For example, in 2020 a Spanish journalist caused controversy and had to make a public apology after using the term to refer to late media personality La Veneno.
Brazilian transgender activists, and Erika Hilton, coined the term transvestigênere, to encompass all the spectrum of travesti, transgender, and transsexual experiences in a unifying word. The term is inclusive of trans non-binary people, trans men, trans women, and transmasculine individuals, using neolingual ending.
Some also use the term travesty, ending with the letter y, to mean the same as travesti, but sounding more artistic, subversive, or decolonial.