RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Transvestites Condemned to Sex-Trade to Survive

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 3 2000 (IPS) - For the first time in the history of Argentina, a transvestite was hired by a public institution without being required to renounce her current identity — a case that activists hope will draw attention to the plight of this minority.

Organisations of transvestites in this Southern Cone country have long complained that they are condemned to prostitution due to the lack of other opportunities.

“This is the first time I am working in something other than prostitution, and I am grateful for my colleagues’ willingness to teach me,” Lohana Berkins, a transvestite hired a month ago as an administrative assistant to city councilman Patricio Etchegaray, of the Communist Party, told IPS.

Paradoxically, it was the Buenos Aires city council that passed a law two years ago cracking down on street walkers in a move heavily resisted by transvestites who have no other livelihood but the sex trade.

A few years ago, there were an estimated 5,000 transvestites, including immigrants from Chile and Peru, living in this country of 37 million. But in recent years, police repression has forced nearly half of them to emigrate to other Latin American nations, the United States, or Europe, said Berkins.

A full 80 percent of the transvestites interviewed in a survey last year by the City of Buenos Aires Office of the People’s Defender said their main source of income was prostitution, while an additional nine percent said they worked “on the streets,” without specifying in what area or trade.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said they identified as transvestites by the age of 12, 54 percent between the ages of 13 and 18, and 11 percent between the ages of 18 and 24.

The study was carried out to gain an understanding of the problems facing a vulnerable minority that is invisible when it comes to statistics identifying people by gender.

Berkins said the first instance of rejection and isolation suffered by transvestites was when they are kicked out of their homes after assuming their new identity. “I was born into a wealthy family in the (northwestern) province of Salta, but they threw me out when I was 13, which is when I became familiar with poverty and prostitution.”

But that is just the first of a series of rejections, in school and the workplace, unless transvestites renounce their chosen identities and dress and act like men — which Berkins was not required to do when hired by the city council.

The survey by the Office of the People’s Defender found that 19 percent of those interviewed did not complete primary school and 50 percent did not finish high school, which made them even less prepared for a labour market that already rejected them.

Berkins is just now finishing her secondary education at a night school that accepted her transvestite identity. “I’ll graduate at yearend, God willing, and I had the great satisfaction of being chosen by my classmates as their delegate to the school ‘Coexistence Committee’.

“For the past eight years, the organisation I belong to (the Association of Struggle for the Transvestite and Transexual Identity) has been asking authorities to finance training and labour insertion programmes, in order to allow us alternatives to prostitution.”

During heated clashes that broke out two years ago between transvestite street walkers and local residents protesting their presence in certain neighbourhoods, Berkins attempted without success to get the residents to join in the call for training and labour insertion plans, rather than simply lashing out against the transvestites.

“Many of the councillors who called us ‘outlaws’ when we were protesting see me here now, in my new job, and congratulate me,” said Berkins. “But I tell them to congratulate Etchegaray, because he was the councilman who dared to give me a chance to show that we can also be skilled workers.

“I always say that one thing is prostitution by women, which is framed in problems facing their gender and their role with respect to men, and another thing is our situation, because we cannot choose, and we have to fall into prostitution because we often have no other alternative,” Berkins added.

Several episodes have made the phenomenon of transvestism newly visible in Argentina in recent years.

One was the case of a transvestite who went to court seeking custody over her male partner’s two biological children, who had been raised and then abandoned by their biological mother.

Another high-profile case involved Cris Miró, who died of AIDS last year, after successfully competing with the country’s leading “vedettes” or showgirl starlets in theatre revues and even on TV.

But while making a name in show business with a female gender identity, Miró was required to dress as a man while studying dentistry at the university.

Two years ago, a major scandal broke out when transvestites moved into a fashionable Buenos Aires neighbourhood to work the streets. The transvestites’ demands fell on deaf ears, while much was made of the supposed impact their presence had on property values in the area.

“For years, we have been working on building a transvestite’s right to full citizenship,” said Berkins. “We want the state to respect our right to an identity; we don’t want to be marginalised from our homes and our schools, or to be condemned to prostitution, where we are subjected to the worst abuses.”

The survey by the Office of the People’s Defender reported that 86 percent of respondents said they had been mistreated by the police.

“There are illegal detentions, physical and psychological attacks, demands for pay-offs or bribes, and even worse, many of our ‘compañeras’ have been beaten to death in police stations, and no one cries out or defends them,” said Berkins. “What can we expect from society if the state and the police ignore us, marginalise us and mistreat us?

“There is a crisis raging today in Argentina for supposed bribery in the Senate, and many say that nothing will come of it. But if a transvestite commits a misdemeanour, rest assured that there will be demands that she be sent to the gas chamber,” said Berkins, before putting an end to the interview in order to continue with the work in Etchegaray’s office.