Latin America Transgender Rights Movement Seeks Advances in Spite of Setbacks Chris Johnson - Washington Blade
go to original September 15, 2017

Transgender Supermodel Carmen Carrera Fights Inequality in Latin America (Disruption Mag)

Torrential downpours were flooding roads and causing massive traffic jams in the Chapinero area of the Colombian capital shortly after 6:30 p.m. on March 7 when a handful of people were gathered inside the small office of Fundación Grupo de Acción y Apoyo a Personas Trans, a trans advocacy group known by the acronym GAAT.

They were talking about ways to identify trans people as the downpours continued to flood the streets around the building. Transsexuals and cross-dressers are among the words to which they referred, but GAAT Executive Director Laura Weinstein pointed out their meaning can prove complex.

“One of the problems that we have is how to precisely identify (ourselves),” she told the group, which included trans men and women who live in different Bogotá neighborhoods.

How to identify oneself is among the myriad problems trans advocates in Colombia and across Latin America face.

Activists across the region with whom the Washington Blade has spoken since the beginning of the year say violence based on gender identity remains a serious issue.

Three trans women were killed in San Luis Talpa, El Salvador, in February. Stacy Velásquez of Organización Trans Reinas de la Noche, a Guatemala City-based group that advocates on behalf of trans sex workers, in that same month highlighted to the Blade the case of a trans woman who fled to Guatemala after a gang member tried to slit her throat.

Diana Sacayán, a prominent trans rights advocate in Argentina, was stabbed to death in her Buenos Aires apartment in October 2015. Francela Méndez, a former board member of Colectivo Alejandría, a trans Salvadoran advocacy group, was killed a few months earlier while she was visiting a friend at her home in Sonsonate, El Salvador.

A trans sex worker in Cuba was reportedly stoned to death by a group of six teenagers in the province of Pinar del Río in April 2015. The videotaped torture and murder of Dandara dos Santos in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza in February sparked widespread outrage and highlighted the brutal violence based on gender identity that remains commonplace in the country.

Statistics from the Brazilian Secretariat of Human Rights indicate more than half of the 300 reported LGBT murder victims in the country in 2012 were trans, with roughly 52 percent of them people of color. A report the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released in 2014 indicates the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.

... Advocates have celebrated a number of legislative and political advances in the region in spite of persistent violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

Read the rest at Washington Blade

Related: Being Heard Key for Women After Gender-Based Violence (HealthDay)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!