Today is the 10th anniversary of the death of Lohana Berkins, one of the main leaders of travesti activism in Argentina. I wrote this text to remember her some years ago. Now, I have translated it into English to share her legacy with people outside of Latin America.
When embarking on a journey, every culture has its traditions and talismans. Sometimes, a mother’s blessing and a few hugs serve as a talisman against all adversity. Today I am setting out on a journey, and Lohana is protecting me during this experience: two magazines that were published the week she passed away and that, for some reason, let’s call it fate, found their way back into my hands as I was packing my bags. On the left margin of the cover of a newspaper titled En nuestras voces [In Our Voices], Lohana’s brown face blends into a gray background, and her gaze, lost in the sky, contains a spark that seems to fade behind the horizon. A priori, I think of that version of Lohana who, tired of pretending to speak in a girly voice, decided to fearlessly embrace her loud travesti voice. A voice that was heard louder than ever. In an inexplicable sob, I left the magazines among the pile of essential papers and ran off to cry. I never met Berkins in person, but in the tears of those of us who emigrated, there is always a warm comfort when we remember her voice.
The purpose of this article is to reflect on her legacy beyond anecdotes and highlight some of the lessons Berkins taught us. Perhaps between one idea and another we will shed a tear or let out a laugh, but there is no other way to navigate trans lives than by producing theory, humor, and political praxis at the same time. Everything that seems easily locatable on binary categories for cis people, is tinged and confused for us like a pile of feathers on a carnival costume. Lohana was always mutanting, she was always in the gerund form: she was being, doing, saying, living. Any label was tight and uncomfortable for her. That is why, in order to understand her, we need her voice, her unapologetic and undisguised voice, capable of saying the funniest and most bitter things in the same sentence. And we need to keep our ears open and our minds ready to understand that multiple forms of life inhabit the porous territories of sexualities.
If we were to consider a travesti theory of Lohana Berkins, we would have to look at words, the pen, and the fist at the same time, because a travesti theory is inevitably a way of intervening, embodying, and explaining the world. Nothing Lohana said in her thousands of interviews is just a random expression; every word is intersected by a story and a body, by a larger project that contains it and brings it to life. In Lohana’s statements, phrases are not said to please, even if they try to convince us of something. Her statements are not innocent actions, and at the same time, they are full of an irrepressible passion.
Everything that might seem contradictory and confusing about Lohana has an explanation: her project was never about personal advantage, but rather about growing a movement above all else. Lohana didn’t need anyone to explain the mechanics of politics to her; she understood them and hacked them on her own. She could stand on the sidewalks of communism while drinking mate with Eva Perón, winking at Kirchnerism. And that was fine, it was perfect because despite contradictions, it didn’t matter which party got the best story, but rather that a right had been won and a travesti had been protected from violence, hunger, and oblivion. Pragmatism, you might say… Lohana was to Argentine politics what Bill Belichick was to football: defensive strategy, which includes adapting schemes to take advantage of the other team even forcing turnovers. And that’s the point, because there’s no sense in playing stylish when your opponent lifts the trophy. Lohana’s clarity is what makes us miss her so much. In a world where speeches and narratives are more valuable, she chose the material practices.
Lohana was always very clear about at least three things that we should consider central to her theory: 1) the struggle must be with everyone, from an intersectional perspective; 2) identity serves as a platform for organization, but feminisms need to redefine those limits in order to build a perspective beyond identity; and 3) violence, discrimination, and hatred are not just discourse, they are inscribed on the flesh, and to truly win, we must politicize our bodies. These three lines formed the backbone of many of Lohana’s proposals and opened new perspectives in the ways of doing politics. Recovering them is the best way to pay tribute to the greatest Latin American travesti leader. Although it has only been a few years since her passing, in travesti years that is an eternity, and sometimes it even seems that her figure is fading, giving way to new ways of thinking about trans experiences that lose their pathway and flounder in mere narrative.
Making collectively
One of Lohana’s key activist skills was understanding the centrality of alliances in producing more effective conquest. She was the first to present and dispute the idea that travestis embodied much more than a type of disobedient sexual identity; they were also part of the many marginalized groups in post-dictatorial Argentina. The research carried out in Cumbia, copeteo y lágrimas [Cumbia, Guzzling, and Tears] and La gesta del nombre propio [The Feat of One’s Own Name] sought to investigate and present to cis readers the multiple oppressions to which travestis were subjected: not only were they denied their identity and the right to express themselves as they wished, but they also received little schooling, were deprived of formal employment, expelled from the health system, and abused in their families. This lack of rights reduced the life expectancy of travestis to well below the standards of even the most impoverished sectors of society. This made it clear that the solution was not simply to call for the end to violence against their identities, but that comprehensive policies were needed.
This is how alliances were built with feminists, academics, political circles, and any organization that could help ensure that trans women were included in the democracy. Above all, they wanted to be taken into account in political life. “The system has always excluded us, and we don’t want to be included just for the sake of sensationalism on talk shows. We want to enter the system. Allowing people to vote for a travesti would be the healthiest thing that could happen to this rarefied politics,” said Lohana, asking that her life and that of her fellows be taken into account as agents of change and transformation. “We travestis are the ones who are going to provide the party supplies, the show, the fun, right? We also produce knowledge; we can develop theory,” said Lohana, calling on feminists to stop seeing travestis as a problem to be solved with policies on sexuality. The solution came hand in hand with social transformation, and that transformation had to be a joint effort. That is why Berkins threw herself into the abortion debate when it was not strictly a cause that concerned her, and she joined forces with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo when she understood that the trans issue was not just a matter of sexual rights, but a cause for human rights.
She didn’t care about measuring oppression. Whether so-and-so had suffered more, or whether they were more or less accepted within the system: the point was to unify all those violations and build a shared discourse from the margins. Even a discourse that goes beyond identity as a unit of analysis and sets out to consider all forms of disobedience that lead to exclusion from social life. “Self-victimization was the strategy for being accepted” in Argentine political life, but once inside, Lohana set out to discuss many other issues and fight for much more than her right to be a travesti. She understood that in addition to being a travesti, she was also a migrant, a racialized person, a worker, a victim of violence, a rioter. An identity with layers, like an onion.
The problem is with the potato
In 2014, Lohana visited Salta, her hometown, and opened her presentation at the College of Psychologists with this anecdote: “A well-known psychologist, whom I won’t name, once asked me why there were so many travestis in Salta. And I replied, tired of those kinds of silly questions: the problem is that empanadas have potatoes here, and potatoes are the problem. The truth is, instead of seeing what I was getting at, she wanted to know why it was happening in Salta… a scientific answer: Look, the problem is the empanada, the empanada has potatoes, and the potatoes are the problem, so we would have to study the empanada… give me a break!”
Behind that hilarious joke lay something very serious, something Lohana never stopped thinking about: how useful were debates about identity? Was identity an issue exclusive to travestis and trans people? Berkins definitely knew that the right to identity was central, which is why she promoted the creation of the Gender Identity Front, which would achieve the approbation of one of the most important laws in Argentine history and the most notable precedent in the world on the path toward respect for autonomy and the depathologization of trans identities. But in her infinite street smarts, Lohana knew that this was only a point of departure. Identity was the gateway to citizenship, but inhabiting it required deeper debates and actions. Lohana did not understand citizenship as an act of state recognition, but as a furtive practice, made up of small everyday actions. That question from the mysterious psychologist encapsulates much of what we as travestis are tired of hearing, the question about our identity as a great unknown, as if it were something we should have to explain, when cis people are not questioned because they remain supported by their biology.
The travesti identity provided us with a platform to speak out about what we needed to say, but over time it became a tight frame that limited and standardized our discourse. Lohana was interested in breaking down that barrier, presenting herself to society as a travesti who could think beyond these roles socially assigned to travestis. She worked to remove travestis from the entertainment and crime pages of newspapers and allow us to talk and think about economics, politics, ecology, and whatever else we wanted. This commitment by the Argentine trans movement to understand transvestism as a political identity is distinctive in the region and allows us to appreciate in travestis the “critical value of our differences” without getting caught up in an essentialist and pathologizing discourse.
Today we cannot stop to explain our identity to radicalized trans-exclusionary feminists and new conservative organizations; there is no time to re-discuss the rights we have won. There is no room to think about feminism that does not include all of us who have been oppressed by the patriarchal system. From the neighborhood queer to the middle-class gay, from the butch dyke to the most femme, from the closeted trans man to the one who decides to perform masculinity with breasts, from the clandestine crossdressers to the silicone-enhanced travesti sex workers. Who is going to dare to police identities? Who is going to tell us how we should name ourselves and what we can or cannot do to our bodies? Those who come with that plan should go check the empanadas and find the trans issue there, because we are busy winning rights.
My body as an inalienable right
“I don’t want the right to property or the right to vote if I can’t keep my body as an inalienable right,” Berkins repeats on more than one occasion. This phrase brings us back to one of the central topics of Lohana ‘s travesti theory: the centrality of the body. In queer theory, performance is the new god; gender is a narrative that becomes real through repetition. However, queer theory does a poor job of addressing the manifestations of these discourses, the surgeries, techniques, and interventions used to create desirable bodies. About the violence used to produce bodies consistent with a binary representation of sexuality. About the encapsulated breasts of travestis, about their swollen legs as a result of clandestine silicone injections, about those who have been dismembered and raped, about those who have been killed. And Lohana never left behind the bodily experience of her time on the street, at the hands of aggressive clients, at the hands of police violence. For Lohana, the body was the territory where battles were fought, and so politicizing it was urgent in order to win the war.
Return to the body was also a way of escaping the discursivity of feminism, sometimes more concerned with producing floating signifiers than inhabiting them. Reclaiming the territory of practices and thinking about policies that truly transform lives. That is why the obvious steps on which to continue the struggle were access to health and work, because these are what guarantee survival. Words and theories can fill hundreds of pages, but they cannot fill the hungry stomach of the adult travesti who can no longer earn even fifty pesos working the streets. Nine thousand new documents can be issued to travestis and trans people, but if there is a single person who, because their identity is denied, is left without access to a job or housing, everything is wrong. And in that sense, Lohana also gave us a horizon, taking care to put her body on the line and to give substance to what often remains mere ramblings.
Her body was always there, fighting battles, engaging in discussions. Lohana didn’t stand at the door asking anyone for permission: she went in and put her chest out to take the blows, and that’s something we must also learn in this world of virtuality and social media activism. Sometimes bodies have much more to say than pretty posts and slogans on Instagram and Twitter.
* * *
Lohana left us on February 5, 2016. With her passing, our lives lost a little of their sparkle. That day, no one could help but be overcome with grief. Her last letter fills the void and leaves us with the task of resisting:
“Dear friends, my health is very critical and does not allow me to meet with you in person. We have achieved many victories over the years. Now is the time to resist, to fight for their continuity. The time for revolution is now, because we will never return to prison. I am convinced that the engine of change is love. The love that was denied to us is our motivation to change the world. All the hits and contempt I suffered are nothing compared to the infinite love that surrounds me at this moment. Travesti fury always! A hug. Lohana Berkins.”
This is perhaps the fourth legacy of her theory: always resist. No matter how much the winds seem to bring less hostile climates, one must never fully trust the ground gained. Lohana, with one hand raised, closed her speeches by shouting at the top of her lungs, “They shall not pass.” They shall not pass over our conquests, over our theories, over the disobedient ways of looking at and inhabiting this world. With the image of Lohana as an amulet and “they shall not pass” as a mantra, we face strange times, journeys ahead, new territories to conquer, and at least my heart is filled with confidence when I hear Berkins and her loud travesti voice promising us to continue the struggle.
Marce J. Butierrez 
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