Travesti

Where the word travesti came from

The French travesti was in common use by the early nineteenth century, and Portuguese took it over with the same meaning; the English doublet is travesty. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the cognate transvestite entered scientific and medical writing, followed later by transsexual and then transgender. The original sense in Spanish and Portuguese was simply the act of cross-dressing, and it widened in the 1960s to cover people who dressed as women in performance or in daily life.

Spain used the word in a comparable way under Franco and dropped it in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the medical model of transsexuality arrived and the older term was set aside to avoid its stereotypes. Those concepts reached Latin America later, which is why travesti survived there with its connotations intact rather than being replaced. Nothing in the record consulted here dates the first use of the word in its current identity sense.

What no source dates is the shift. Travesti existed in Spanish and Portuguese long before it named a gender, and no record on file marks the year the identity sense separated from the theatrical and cross-dressing ones. The word arrived at its current meaning without anybody writing down when.

Why travesti is not transgender

Writing in the Latin American Research Review in 2020, Joseph M. Pierce set out the distinction as it holds in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. A travesti is generally somebody assigned male at birth who feminises body, dress and behaviour, prefers feminine pronouns and forms of address, and often takes hormones or has silicone injected, without necessarily seeking genital surgery and without necessarily considering herself a woman. Where transgender, trans and transsexual describe a change of gender or sex through legal, bodily or social means, travesti involves gender variance without always claiming gendered difference.

The argument for keeping the word is political rather than clinical. On Pierce's account, transgender depoliticises a violent history of social and economic marginalisation, while travesti retains the class position and the popular resonance. Cole Rizki, writing in Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2019, added the qualification that trans and travesti identifications shift constantly and are not mutually exclusive, and that the tension between them is often simply untranslatable.

How travestis change the body

Bodily practice is part of what the category names. Cosmetic procedures, hormone treatment, filler and silicone injections and cosmetic surgery are common, and genital surgery generally is not. One survey of the literature describes travestis as embodying an imagined femininity without fully abandoning masculinity, keeping male genitals by choice, and sitting as liminal figures who are neither transsexuals nor drag queens.

The conditions under which that happens are the reason the word carries what it carries. A respondent-driven sampling survey of 304 travestis in a large city of northeast Brazil, conducted between August and December 2008, found 49 per cent under 24 years old, 55 per cent with only elementary schooling, 91 per cent reporting experience of homophobia and 82 per cent doing sex work, with 12 per cent disclosing a positive HIV result. Argentine reparations campaigns describe travestis over 40 as survivors, in a country whose general life expectancy is 75.

How Argentine law changed

For most of the twentieth century, and in some places into the twenty-first, wearing clothes of the opposite sex was a scandalous misdemeanour in most Argentine provinces and municipalities. Police used those rules to detain trans women and travestis for walking down the street, or to extort them, sometimes dozens of times a year, holding them for hours or days without a sentence or a lawyer. Intra-community solidarity under those conditions has been documented by the Archivo de la Memoria Trans. In Buenos Aires the misdemeanour was repealed in 1998.

The 2012 Gender Identity Law allows a person to change name and gender marker and to obtain trans-related healthcare without a judge's approval and without a diagnosis, and it makes both free. A national law of 2021 added tax incentives and a one per cent quota for trans employees in federal government jobs, with selection rules that ignore anti-crossdressing convictions and set aside the usual educational requirements. Three reparations bills for older travestis and trans people have reached the Argentine Congress. A recent Buenos Aires survey found that only 9 per cent of trans women and travestis hold formal jobs.

What travesticide names

Travesticide was developed as a legal and analytical category by Blas Radi and Alejandra Sardá-Chandiramani in 2016, and applied for the first time in Argentina in 2018, at the trial for the murder of the travesti activist Diana Sacayán. It names a hate crime committed against a travesti, and it exists because counting those deaths under femicide obscured who was being killed and why.

The activists most often named in this history worked on employment rather than on recognition. Lohana Berkins used government grants to set up small cooperative factories; Diana Amancay Sacayán obtained employment quotas in the government of Buenos Aires province. Claudia Pía Baudracco, Marlene Wayar and Susy Shock are named alongside them in Argentina, Erika Hilton in Brazil and Yren Rotela in Paraguay.

Why the community argues about the word

There is no settled position and the disagreement is not a fringe one. The Brazilian activist Amara Moira holds that trans woman and travesti are synonyms, and that people use the first to avoid what the second still carries. Against that, the imposition of the transgender and transvestite categories over travesti identities by Anglo-American academics has been described from within the region as colonising, and resisted on that basis.

The word also remains a slur in some contexts, which is a fact about usage rather than a judgement on the identity. Researchers have proposed at least three readings of what travestis constitute: a third gender comparable to Hijra or Muxe, a reinforcement of the gender binary, or a dismantling of the category of gender altogether. Similar groups across the region carry other names again, among them vestidas, traveca and loca, and reducing any of them to a single explanation is what the ethnographic literature warns against.