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Trans Rights in Mexico and Canada: Queering the Geopolitics of Privilege
Oralia Gómez-Ramírez, University of British Columbia
When I asked trans activists Angie Rueda Castillo and Irina Layevska what this piece should be about, they both encouraged me to account what is happening in the struggle for trans people’s rights in Mexico, and how this may contrast and compare to the state of affairs in Canada.
In Mexico City, a local law81 was approved in 2008 allowing trans peoples to change their name and sex on birth certificates and other official documents. Despite its narrow provincial jurisdiction and current limited accessibility and affordability, this legal change has been viewed positively by members of the trans communities. The measure allows trans peoples to obtain birth certificates without marginal annotations indicating the sex and name legally assigned to them at birth, and does not require them to undergo genital surgery to obtain identification documents. Acutely aware of the status of trans-related legislations in other parts of the world, activists in Mexico have praised the law not only for addressing issues of social stigma, but also for imposing a medicalized framework, thus enabling recognition of a wider array of trans experiences.
In the field of critical intersectional studies of gender and sexuality, there is a general willingness to be self-critical and open to new ideas and transformation. At the same time, coming from and having carried out my doctoral fieldwork in one location in the global South, specifically in Mexico City, I notice the ways in which many concepts, categories, discourses, policies, strategies, and the like emerge in the global North, become influential and, subsequently, are circulated and taken up in the global South as desirable models of sensible, good or best practices. Needless to say, those flows of ideas are not unidirectional or unequivocal, although it is an intricate task to trace the genealogy of an idea or a concept and how it travels worldwide. Yet, it is hard to be oblivious to the fact that such circulations occur against a backdrop of uneven and hierarchical global geopolitical configurations wherein nation-states’ wealth and power differentials matter.
It is commonplace to encounter media representations and everyday interpretations both within and outside Canada, which convey the notion that terms and practices of the global North are inherently better. Despite the widespread consensus among critical scholars that these ranking scales are historically and politically constructed, often the concepts and policies used in the global North echo around the world, while notions and strategies emanating from the global South do not share that fate or privilege.
Let me draw briefly on some of the findings of my doctoral research project on trans women’s efforts to obtain rights in Mexico City to provide further example of these uneven travels. Among working class lower-class and economically disadvantaged male-to-female persons, many of whom are street-based sex workers, the terms jota and vestida are widely used to name each other and themselves. These naming practices emerge out of and reflect the historically specific labour, class, and gender configurations of Mexico City today. The socioeconomic contexts and lived experiences that explain these particular naming practices are complex and deserve more attention than I can give here. Suffice it to say that context matters and these terms are employed differently to refer to what we, in the West, understand as ‘transgendered’ or ‘transsexual’ women. As well, a growing number of studies in the field have shown these terms have been in circulation for at least two decades, if not longer. More recently – prior to and particularly after the approval of the 2008 local legislation – terms like transgénero (transgender) and mujer trans (trans woman) began to be used.
The introduction of terms which have global currency has not however displaced the use of the domestic terminologies. But it has led to a symbolic struggle locally, because the globally circulating terms are valued higher while the geographically influenced terms are viewed as ‘backward’, incorrect, and derogatory. Their coexistence is certainly hierarchical. Were it not for the resilience of the local notions, one would be tempted to overlook the historicity of all of these concepts. More importantly, their conflicting simultaneity in Mexico City allows us to be critical about the ways in which these travelling concepts from the global North get constructed as intrinsically-superior, taken up as common sense, or seen as an always-there vocabulary due, in large part, to geopolitical privilege.
In Mexico and other locations across the global South, the vocabulary of ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ have been taken up by some activists for diverse reasons. What these words mean whenever they travel across borders is ever changing. In Mexico City, terms circulating at the local level (that could have potentially resulted in the rise of a movement for jotas’ or vestidas’ rights, instead of trans women’s rights) have not been politicized or reclaimed. Rather, it is the embracing of global terms and notions that have helped trans people articulate their demands and gain relative legitimacy in the socio-legal fields. I am not suggesting they have to steer clear of ‘foreign’ or ‘imposed’ concepts in their mobilizing efforts. Rather, I am encouraging us – scholars and activists based in the global North – to remain aware of the geopolitical and epistemic privileges that underlie these processes, and to find ways to help dismantle the disparities and inequalities of today’s world system, which is inevitably shaping the politics of gender- and sexuality-based social justice struggles worldwide.
The trans population is one of the most marginalized groups in Mexican society today. Structural and systemic vulnerabilities and pervasive discriminatory practices are expressed in higher rates of HIV/AIDS incidence, hate crimes, rates of incarceration, and police extortion, among other problems. Thus the challenges facing trans peoples in Mexico are multiple. On the legal terrain –one area in which the trans peoples seek to effect change – challenges include the need for legal literacy and lack of economic literacy and resources needed to benefit from local legislations. Another major challenge is political literacy, which is essential for transforming the prevailing system of partial citizenship. In the absence of a federal law protecting them, many trans people are undocumented in their own country of birth.
Why does this issue matter to a Canada-based audience such as the one reading this blog series?82
Why is it important to talk about what happens in Mexico or anywhere else in the global South? As I have maintained, what happens in the global North does matter to what goes on in global South – that is, to how gender- and sexuality-based struggles are framed, what issues are highlighted, what vocabularies are rendered politically viable, what strategies are employed. I suggest that we reflect on the ways in which Canada plays a key role in holding, allocating and administering asymmetrical socioeconomic and political privilege worldwide, and how this conferred privilege may be shaping, in not-altogether helpful ways, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, intersex, Two– spirited (and other) political and academic struggles taking place within and beyond the geographical confines of Canada.
81 Mexico City Oks trans name, ID changes. Yahoo! Groups. Retrieved from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ transgendernews/message/31072
82 Fedcan Blog. (2012). Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered/Queer/Intersex/Two-Spirited. Retrieved from http:// blog.fedcan.ca/tag/lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered-queer-intersex-two-spirited/
Having a broader geopolitical dialogue that gets translated into meaningful transnational alliances is needed now more than ever. We should keep an eye out for the ways in which the geopolitical privileges we enjoy that come from being based in the global North, including in Canada, structures what takes place in other latitudes. This proposition is certainly not novel, but as a woman of colour from the global South, I still see value in insisting upon this kind of mindfulness and critical engagement.