11 Resistance and Resilience of Brazilian Travestis – Corinne Vicario,

Introduction

On September 7, 2019, a 27-year-old travesti sex worker named Nilda was fatally shot in the Brazilian municipality of Santa Maria after refusing service to a client. The client attempted to rape her, then fatally shot her when she refused. In the wake of her murder, LGBT advocate and fellow travesti Inês arranged to have her buried in one of her favorite dresses, noting that “burying a travesti in women’s clothing is part of the struggle. To ensure that Nilda was buried as a woman, we ran to the morgue, carrying a beautiful dress, as yet unused, and a new pair of shoes. At least she would be buried as she would have liked to live forever, beautiful and female.” In spite of these efforts, Nilda’s tomb was inscribed with her birth name, rather than the feminine name she had chosen for herself. And later that year, on December 12, Inês herself was stabbed to death by a client, just 11 days after being honored at Santa Maria’s LGBTI+ parade (Souza, 5-8).

The cases of Nilda and Inês serve to show the struggles that face the travesti community in Brazil, both in life and in death. Yet the resilience of the travestis also provides a study of a history which disrupts the colonial gender binary, which has become even more relevant as transgender identity has entered into international political debate. Originating from the verb transvestir (to cross-dress), travesti refers to a person who is born male, is attracted to males, and intentionally alters their appearance to be more feminine — including injecting silicone to create curves and, in some cases, taking feminizing hormones — but who does not identify as a woman, instead travesti. In the words of one travesti, Carlinhos, “I’m not removing anything [God] gave me. I’m just improving things. He gave me a chest — I made it bigger. He gave me a bunda — I made it bigger. He gave me thighs — I made them bigger. I’m making what He gave me in life more beautiful” (Kulick, 84). As opposed to transformistas, a term which maps onto the English concept of drag queens, travestis live out their daily lives in their feminine expression rather than restricting it to evening parties or performances. Because the travesti gender category does not exist in English, I will use she/her pronouns if they are specified by a source to refer to a specific travesti, but otherwise follow Hutta and Balzer’s convention of using s_he/hir pronouns to respect the integrity and uniqueness of travesti identity. For discussions which involve non-travesti transgender individuals in Brazil, I will use the term “transsexual” when referring to specific sources or studies which use “transsexual” as a category for statistical purposes, but will otherwise default to using the term “transgender” as the preferred term for the transgender community.

The Historical Presence of Travestis in Brazil

Historically, travestis have faced significant backlash for their identity. Following the 1964 coup d’etat, the military dictatorship enacted brutal repression against travestis, who were primarily employed as sex workers. Though prostitution itself was not illegal, police would detain and arrest travestis under the crime of vagrancy. This process reached its peak in 1981 during Operation Rondão, when 1500 travestis were arrested in the course of a single week and called “lixo humano,” lit. “human trash” (Hutta et Balzer, 76). This antagonistic relationship with the civil and military police, set up by the dictatorship, would continue even after the fall of the dictatorship in 1985.

Another significant event in the history of travestis was the first reported case of AIDS in Brazil in 1982. The AIDS epidemic created a new devastation in the travesti community, though it is difficult to identify the scope of deaths due to AIDS because travestis were not given their own category for medical purposes; instead, they were simply listed as homosexual males. But beyond the immediate fatalities due to complications from AIDS, the stigma which began during the epidemic also led to significant harassment and violence against the travesti community.

The aftershocks of these events continue to define attitudes towards the travesti community in the present day. In 2019, the number of LGBT+ victims of violent deaths in Brazil was found to be 329, with travestis accounting for over a quarter of these (Grupo Gay da Bahia, 43). According to SINAN (the Brazilian Information System for Notifiable Diseases), between 2015 and 2017 there were almost 25,000 notifications of interpersonal and self-harm against the LGBTI+ population, of which 46.6% were transsexuals and travestis. More worrying, though, was the 78% increase in recorded episodes of violence against travestis between 2015 and 2017 (Souza et al., 3). This increase indicates the continuing prevalence of anti-travesti sentiment in the present. But these statistics do not paint the full picture of the travesti experience. In the words of Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos, “A lot of ethnographic studies were made in Brazil, and those cisgender researchers only described the violence that we suffer. So, we have the responsibility as critical scholars to go beyond that.” In this vein, I will be exploring the methods which Brazilian travestis used to resist and persevere in the face of social and political repression. I examine the ways in which travestis advocate for their interests using a variety of methods, including protest and direct action, the formation of civic organizations, and judicializing their demands.

Analytical Framework and Literature Review

In my analysis, I lean heavily on Matos’s “Gender and Sexuality in Brazilian Public Policy,” particularly his vision of the forms of state-society relationships in Brazil. Previous typologies have outlined four approaches: protest and direct action; partnerships between nongovernmental organizations and the state; institutional engagement; and hybrid relationships. But Matos’s introduction of a fifth form of interaction, which he terms “judicializing demands,” is necessary to discuss the role which courts have played in securing the rights of travestis in Brazil.

In addition, my discussion of travesti ideas of gender is tied to Maria Lugones’s concept of the coloniality of gender, since the history of travesti repression cannot be extricated from its relationship to colonial ideas of binary gender and race in Brazil. Previous scholarship on travestis has heavily weighted the idea of beauty, arguing that “Beauty, and the processes involved in achieving it, are at the core of the construction of travesti gender identities” (Vartabedian, 82), and that travestis’ “major preoccupation is not their social lives, but rather their own appearance” (Kulick, 43). But the idea of femininity and masculinity in Brazil itself pulls from the complicated history of colonization and the transatlantic slave trade that created the country’s demography. Therefore scholarship on travesti resistance must acknowledge the intersectional nature of anti-travesti sentiment and its effects on Afro-Brazilian travestis.

Moreover, the question of binary gender is supremely relevant to travestis, who have been positioned both as a “third gender” and as “perfect[ing] the gendered messages that exist in Brazilian society,” rather than inverting them (Kulick, 9). In either view, the discussion revolves around the central framing of binary gender. Rather than taking binary gender as an immutable fact of biology, Lugones’s work helps to trouble and decentralize this viewpoint.

Finally, I understand the pushback against travesti identity through Javier Corrales’s research on the factors which relate to anti- and pro-LGBT sentiments in Latin America. In particular, Corrales’s work serves to explain why Brazil remains “one of the world’s murder capitals of LGBT individuals” in spite of the legal protections which the government extends to LGBT people (Corrales 54). The reason for the increase in anti-travesti violence between 2015 and 2017 mentioned in the introduction lies beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to recognize the ways in which progressive legislation can exist alongside increases in regressive sentiment. These two impulses do not cancel each other out, and indeed may be indicative of a trend in Latin America, which Corrales notes has generally instituted progressive laws prior to significant changes in societal acceptance of LGBT identities. As I explore the methods which travestis have used to secure and defend their rights in Brazil, it is important to pose Corrales’s question: “Can legal change expedite attitudinal change or does it instead retard change by giving rise to backlashes?” (Corrales 56). There is no trivial answer to the weight of legal protections as opposed to the wave of reactionary violence which may follow these policies. This paper instead focuses on the numerous ways in which travestis have navigated a hostile society, both legal and social.

Analysis

Since the emergence of travesti identity, travestis have maintained their safety and culture through direct action and supporting their own communities. Beginning in the early 1980s, the Grupo Gay da Bahia distributed free condoms to travestis on a weekly basis (Kulick 25). Beyond these sorts of preventative measures, many also supported travestis who were already HIV-positive. One notable travesti activist was Brenda Lee, who began taking in young homeless travestis in 1980.  In 1985, following a series of assassinations, s_he created a foster home called the “Palácio das Princesas” (“Palace of Princesses”). With the rise of HIV, Brenda transformed this “Palace” into a support system for HIV patients during their treatment at the Hospital Emílio Ribas. In 1988, an agreement with the state government of São Paulo transformed the Palácio das Princesas into the Casa de Apoio Brenda Lee, the first support center for travestis and transgender people in São Paulo. Following this agreement, Brenda Lee turned hir work toward constructing support networks and raising awareness about HIV, but tragically s_he was brutally assassinated in 1996 (Mota Alonso Diéguez, 38). The work of Brenda Lee serves to show the way that travestis built community and protected each other in the face of societal repression.

Travestis also demonstrated resilience by manipulating anti-travesti sentiment to protect themselves. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, the travesti community’s association with HIV led to heightened public stigma against travesti bodies, particularly their blood. The longstanding antagonistic relationship between travestis and the military and civil police of Brazil meant that travestis endured significant harassment, assault, and sometimes murder at the hands of the police. In response, travestis developed an unusual tactic: to “slice open the veins of their inner arm and spray the policemen with blood” (Kulick 33). Though this tactic existed prior to the start of the AIDS epidemic, the practice’s effectiveness increased hand-in-hand with public fear of HIV transmission and allowed travestis to distract and defend themselves enough to escape from attempted violence at the hands of the police.

These examples of direct action to protect and support travestis throughout the 1980s were followed by the construction of civic organizations in the 1990s which supported travesti interests. The first travesti NGO, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was ASTRAL: the Associação de travestis e liberados (Hutta et Balzer, 77). By holding national conferences, the idea of a national travesti interest emerged (Araújo dos Passos). Whereas the direct action of the 1980s had been largely regional, based in major cities such as São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, an emerging consciousness of travesti identity and political organizing on a national scale set the scene for large-scale travesti activism in Brazil.

In 1999, the Disque Defesa Homosexual (DDH) was founded with the goal of making police less aggressive towards travestis. Notably, the DDH had tripartite representation: one lesbian leader, one gay male leader, and one transgender/travesti member. This organization reflects the rise of NGOs in political organizing for travestis. But the DDH struggled to create change due to the twin issues of negative perceptions of the Brazilian civil and military police and the social assumption of the limited role that state institutions can play in the actual lives of LGBT people (Hutta et Balzer, 77-83).

In spite of this, state institutions have been able to provide security for travesti individuals through legislation which guarantees respectful treatment of travesti identities. One such example is the Respeito Tem Nome (“Respect has a name”) program, which was instituted in São Paulo in 2021. As of February 8, 2023, 285 people had registered for the program, which allows travestis and transgender Brazilians to rectify their name and gender on government identification to match with their expressed identity. Notably, participants can request to modify these documents without needing to undergo sexual reassignment surgery or a psychiatric evaluation (Secretaria Especial de Comunicação 2023). The significance of this legislation ties in with the case of Nilda’s murder, where she was subjected to extreme violence as a result of her identity, then faced having her identity erased even in death. Guaranteeing recognition of travesti identities not only ensures their bodies being treated in dignity postmortem, but also encourages respectful recognition of their identities in life.

Conclusion

In light of the wave of anti-transgender laws which have been passed in the spring of 2023, and which are continuing to surge as of the writing of this paper, the question of the role which gender plays in society both nationally and internationally comes into question. In Idaho and Indiana, the institution of bans on gender-affirming care for minors will require children who are currently taking medications to assist in transitioning to stop doing so (Nerea et Cineas). But travestis have historically pursued physical transition or modification at young ages, such as in the case of Chispita, who began injecting hormones at age eight (Kulick, 62). The travesti history of taking hormones, however, is complicated. Due to a lack of appropriate medical knowledge, the unsupervised use of hormones has led to uncomfortable and occasionally fatal side effects, which may explain the preference for bodily modifications using silicone (Hutta et Balzer, 76). An alternate view alleges that because travestis were often paid to penetrate their clients, using silicone rather than taking hormones allows them to continue to work while attaining a more feminine shape (Vartabedian, 88). Regardless of the exact motivation, the travesti affinity for silicone has led many travestis to supplement their income as bombadeiras, injecting other travestis with silicone. It is notable that in Brazil, injecting silicone counts as mutilation of the body and has been made illegal (Vartabedian 85). Thus the story of the many ways that travestis chose to change their bodies, as well as the ways that they engaged with the obstacles which made transition difficult, provides an alternative view of what transition and gendered presentation can look like in a modern context.

But more important than the act of body modification itself, the ways that travestis have established and protected themselves as a community within a repressive society provide an outline for transgender resilience both within Brazil and internationally. The pushback against travesti bodies is not, of course, restricted to their bodies — it is a system of oppression which ties together the discomfort of gender non-conformity, of homosexual attraction, and of sex work, which are further complicated by the racial and political context of gender in Brazil. As a result, the ways in which travestis defend and establish themselves in Brazil serve as a testament to the power of direct action and political organizing. This paper demonstrates the numerous ways in which travestis have protected themselves and fought for dignity in the face of repression by supporting each other directly and through the establishment of organizations to fight for travesti interests. Though anti-travesti violence remains to be challenged even in the modern day, the organizing efforts of several generations of travestis see their legacy in the continued existence, organizing, and struggle of travestis in Brazil.

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