Common in Latin America, the Portuguese and Spanish-language term travesti (; ) can either be used synonymously with the English transgender, or used to specifically 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.Kulick, 1998, p. 5 The travesti population has historically been socially vulnerable and criminalized, subjected to social exclusion and structural violence, and discrimination, harassment, arbitrary detentions, torture and murder have been 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" (like the hijras of India and the muxe of Mexico), 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 , , , , , , , traveco, and , 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

Despite being an emic concept widely used throughout the region, the definition of is a source of controversy because it refers to heterogeneous and multiple identities, making it paradoxical to reduce the terms to universal explanations. 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.

The use of the term was common in French in the early 19th century,, Volume II, p. 896 from where it was imported into Portuguese with the same meaning.Porto Editora – travesti no Dicionário infopédia da Língua Portuguesa [em linha]. Porto: Porto Editora. [consult. 2024-05-02 20:58:24]. Disponível em https://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa/travesti Transvestite ( in Spanish and Portuguese) gained usage in scientific and medical literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed by the terms "transsexual" and "transgender". The original use of travesti 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. 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.

Scholar Cole Rizki pointed out that "trans and identifications are constantly shifting and should not be understood as mutually exclusive. The tensions between trans and 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." Writing for the Latin American Research Review in 2020, Joseph M. Pierce claimed that in Hispanic American countries, "as a general category, (transgender) 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 , 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 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 may have been assigned "male" at birth but does not necessarily consider herself a woman (though some do). [...] For many travestis the term transgender depoliticizes a violent history of social and economic marginalization. The term , 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 are synonymous, and many people use the former to avoid the negative connotations associated with the latter. The imposition of the transgender and transvestite categories by Anglo-American academics over 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 category has been reappropriated by Brazilian, Peruvian and especially Argentine activists since the 1990s,Raíces Montero, ed., 2010. p. 61 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 activism since its emergence in the 1990s was the creation of their own political subjectivities. Argentine activist Lohana Berkins pointed out in 2006: We hold the 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 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 and link it with struggle, resistance, dignity and happiness.

Despite its reappropriation by some as a political identity, in some places (especially Spain) 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.

Although the use of the term 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 (Portuguese) or (Spanish) 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 (roughly "travestity"), or (roughly "transvestivity"). In the same way, the words and (roughly "transvestiteness" or "transvestment") are used as an alternative to "transvestism", but to designate (i.e. drag performers). The Hispanicism travestism () is sometimes seen in articles in English about the topic, especially by South American authors.

Brazilian transgender activists, Indianarae Siqueira 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.

History and culture

Argentina

An important historical source of information on the travesti community during the 20th century are the firsthand accounts of Malva Solís, who emigrated from Chile as a teenager and lived in Argentina until her death in 2015, at the age of 93. She was regarded as the longest-lived travesti from the country.

After collecting testimonies from travestis over the age of seventy, Josefina Fernández found in 2004 that most of them regarded the first period of Juan Perón's government—who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955—as "the one that most clearly began the persecution of gay men and travestis, whether or not they practiced street prostitution." In those years, travestis (identified at that time as mariconas) began to be regularly imprisoned at the Devoto prison, as "sex offenders." The prison was a recurring meeting point for travestis and continued to be so until the 21st-century.

Despite its repressive aspects, the prison space gave them the possibility of generating solidarity strategies and forging links that would later spread outside. They even developed their own argot known as carrilche, which was built on prison jargon. As anthropologist María Soledad Cutuli explains: "Today this code is known as the teje. It consists of taking up elements of prison jargon or "[police] lunfardo", deforming some syllables of certain words, and also using invented terms such as cirilqui to refer to the police, or even the polysemic teje (Spanish for "weaving"), which can mean, depending on the context, 'lie, story, argument, affair.' To say that someone is a tejedora implies a subtle way of qualifying her as a liar; to ask 'what are they tejiendo?' refers to assuming that a meeting or conversation may have ulterior motives".