Strategizing Gender: Navigating Criminalized (Trans)Masculinity in the Greater Area of Buenos Aires

• In Event: 30407 - Trans Life Chances under Institutionalized Violence and Discrimination

Abstract

In 2012, Argentina’s Gender Identity Law introduced self-determination as the sole criterion for legal gender recognition; however, over a decade later, this identity-based framework coexists with enduring biological criteria for gender determination as a social and institutional framework. This paper examines how transmasculine individuals in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires navigate and strategize these competing frameworks in their interactions with police. Amid rising moral panic about trans folk and the proliferation of legislation restricting bodily autonomy, Argentina’s Gender Identity Law serves as a case to examine the limitations and potentials of rights-based legislation.
Drawing on 22 interviews, I analyze transmasculine individuals’ experiences with police violence and the strategies they employ to mitigate exposure to harassment and criminalization. Interviewees anticipate police officers’ assessment of their gender, and how it places them in specific gendered archetypes with differing proximities to criminalization. In a reflexive process, these negotiate between their identity, their desired embodiment, and their expected exposure to police harassment and violence.
To a great extent, participants who shared stories of being subjected to discretionary policing expressed being targeted because they were gendered as men, particularly when they fitted the imaginary of criminalized masculinities faced by racialized and poor youth. Other transmasculine folk leverage the legal and social protections afforded to women as a protected class to deescalate interactions with police. Through strategies such as maintaining feminine or ambiguous gender enactment, shifts in behavior, or retaining documentation with a female legal-sex marker, they mobilize the extensive legal protections for women in Argentina, including those within the police code of conduct. A last group of participants leverages transness as a legally protected category with the same means, experiencing mixed results: transness is discursively “displaced” as a legitimization for police attention while racialization, class, and other traits associated with criminality take center stage in constructions of good and bad citizens.

Author

• Francis J Fabre, University of Chicago