Between the 1960s and the late 1990s, the transvestite and transgender community in Argentina was subjected to sustained violence. In this context, the last civil-military and ecclesiastical dictatorship in Argentina was a period of exacerbation of this violence, which sought to establish a family model and a supposedly patriarchal “Western and Christian” morality. During the dictatorship, places such as the Pozo de Banfield, a clandestine detention, kidnapping and torture center of Buenos Aires Provincial Police’s Security, Investigations and Intelligence Brigade, acted as a special corrective for sexual dissidents.

Sexual dissidences, victims of State terrorism, were historically made invisible and it is estimated that in the investigations carried out by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, around 400 files catalogued under the category of “depraved and sodomites” were excluded at the request of the Catholic community. In addition, the counting of trans victims is complex because many were not sought by their relatives, were dettained with a different identity than the self-perceived and/or catalogued as NN.

Only in 2018 did the government of Santa Fe recognize 19 trans and transvestites women as political prisoners and victims of the last dictatorship due to their gender identity, and allowed their access to historical reparations through provincial law 13.298, a measure that seeks to be extended to the rest of the victims.

In Argentina, police edicts that ruled the illegality of trans persons and allowed them to be arrested and fined for simply walking the streets were in force until 2000. During the dictatorship, an article related to the wearing of contrary gender clothing, and in democracy until 2000 an article that alluded to public scandal and incitement to carnal intercourse, functioned as a normative framework to justify abuses and police persecution of trans identities. Being part of the community of trans women was synonymous with living in hiding, being persecuted, criminalized, discriminated against, segregated, physically and/or symbolically violated on a recurrent and daily basis. Police methods were violent and the street was a dangerous place to meet and work. The Pan-American Highway, where many transvestites/transsexuals worked as prostitutes, was a place of police persecution and murder. The visibility of the community was not possible because trans people were denounced and the strategy was to survive hidden without “coming out of the closet” (a phrase used to refer to trans people who had to hide because of the social discrimination and violence they suffered in the public sphere). This context forced the mass exile of many trans people between 1970 and 1990. In fact, the carnival and the exile during this period were meeting places for the trans community, since they were possibilities to express their identity and to move in public without being repressed.

From 1990 onwards, a series of regulatory frameworks and rights policies promoted by different social organizations of the LGTB+ collective began to change the situation of the trans community and many exiled trans women began to return to the country. In the 1990s, the first precedents of cases of trans people requesting a change of name and sex before the courts were set. On May 24, 2012, Argentina’s Gender Identity Law (Law 26,743) was enacted, allowing the depathologization and destigmatization of trans identities that until then were diagnosed as “sexual identity disorder or gender dysphoria”. This law allowed people to be treated, to modify their data in their personal documents and to be attended by the health systems to adapt their body to their self-perceived identity through hormonal therapies or surgical interventions. Since 2000, trans people are no longer considered illegal and since 2003, proposals have been presented to guarantee their right to identity and comprehensive health care, putting an end to the judicial, criminalizing and pathologizing treatments with which they were treated.

In 2018 the crime that caused the death of Diana Sacayán was the first to be categorized as a gender identity hate crime and transvesticide. Diana was a trans activist who fought for the inclusion of the transgender collective, created the Liberation Antidiscrimination Movement and promoted the trans quota law project in the province of Buenos Aires. In 2015 she was found stabbed to death with 27 injuries and signs of torture. Six years later, in 2021 the Transvestite Trans “Diana Sacayán-Lohana Berkins” Quota and Labor Inclusion Law was sanctioned, which established the reservation of a minimum of 1% of positions and vacancies in the national public sector for transvestites, transsexuals and transgender people who meet the conditions of suitability.

Despite these advances, the transvestite-trans community still suffers from discriminatory acts, physical, verbal, economic, social and institutional violence, as well as high rates of transvesticides and hate crimes. Violence, marginalization and poverty structurally violate their rights and they are not guaranteed good medical care, access to housing, education and labor insertion, which results in an average life expectancy of 35 to 40 years. From these conditions, having survived the dictatorship and also the institutional violence and structural marginalization in the years of democracy, many trans people define themselves as “survivors”.