Gender Rights and Diversity. A Never-ending Road. Interview with Siobhan Guerrero McManus

Carlos Maza: What are the main issues the LGBTQI+ community faces nowadays? What is today’s status of the recognition of non-binary gender identities or what we call sexual diversity?
Siobhan Guerrero McManus: We find ourselves in a situation where a series of forms of violence already existed and affected trans and non-binary populations; structural, underlying forms of violence that have been occurring for decades and have intensified in a particularly difficult global environment over the last five to seven years, with the rise of the “new right,” new authoritarianisms, and anti-gender and anti-rights movements.

When discussing underlying forms of violence, we typically start with the most severe, transfeminicidal violence, which affects trans women and non-binary transfeminine people; that is, a spectrum of identities. It must be said that the most lethal region in the world in this regard, unfortunately, is Latin America. The region consistently leads the way in all types of violence; it also leads in transfeminicidal violence. And both regionally and globally, the country with the highest number of transfeminicides in absolute terms is Brazil, followed by Mexico, also in absolute terms.

Siobhan Guerrero McManus
Picture: Arturo Orta

The region experiences a paradox because it has been a pioneer in gender diversity legislation. The regional paradox is that in countries like Argentina— which was at the forefront until Milei’s arrival—and others, laws regarding sexual diversity have been established, yet despite this, it is the most violent region for trans women and, in general, for LGBT people and transmasculinities.

There are very clear profiles of who, for example, are the most murdered trans women: sex workers, migrants, racialized women, mostly between the ages of 20 and 40, which is an age at which they are most visible. After sex work, the next riskiest occupation is styling, and then human rights activism. Many people are surprised by the styling aspect. In reality, it’s most likely because occasional sex work is reported as styling.

I would say that, globally, transfeminicidal violence is one of the three issues that has most concerned trans activism, probably the most pressing in Latin America. The other two are depathologization and the essentialist view of gender, which also often generates discrimination (as it leads to the non-recognition of identities). This has led to theorizing the existence of what is known today as a new system of oppression, cissexism, an analogue of heterosexism, of traditional sexism.

What cissexism expresses—the term comes from the prefix cis, as in cisgender (as non-trans people are known) and the term sexism—is that we are facing a system of oppression based on conceptions of sex that distinguish between what are considered normative ways of inhabiting a sexualized body and ways that are not considered normative. Homophobia, lesbophobia, and biphobia are the clearest results of heterosexism. In the case of cissexism, we see it in transphobia and enbyphobia, as the phobia of non-binary people is known.

THREE PLACES OF STRUGGLE
Pathologization
Among historical structural violence, perhaps the oldest is pathologization, which began in the late 19^th century and has accompanied us throughout the 20^th century and part of the 21^st. All dissident sex-gender identities were at some point considered mental disorders. This led to a series of discrimination problems in all areas: in school, at work, and in civil and political rights. In the case of LGBTIQ identities, depathologization began to be achieved globally in the 1990s, after having been achieved in the United States in the 1970s. In the case of the trans community, the struggle has taken longer; it was only in 2018 that the World Health Organization openly stated that trans identities cannot continue to be pathologized.

Pathologization did not just consist of being told you had an illness; the State itself imposed a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to recognize your identity. Only with that diagnosis and a series of interventions, which were mandatory for a long time, could you achieve recognition of your identity. The problem? Many people didn’t want to undergo these interventions, as they resulted in losing the ability to gestate or conceive, depending on the person’s sex assigned at birth. In the case of trans women, you had to undergo chemical or surgical castration. In the case of trans men, it could be a hysterectomy, the removal of the ovaries. In any case, the loss of those sexual and reproductive capacities was a precondition in order for your identity to be recognized. Thus, the State demanded trans populations to sacrifice their sexual and reproductive rights in order to recognize their identity, which violated the principle of integral human rights.

That was the axis, the banner of trans communities, during the second half of the 20^th century, and even now, in some countries, there are laws that continue to pathologize, so it remains important to fight for depathologization. It is associated with cissexism because the idea that a transgender identity is an identity resulting from an illness, be it trauma or some biological condition, is an example of how cisgender bodies are considered more natural, normal, and functional than transgender bodies. Pathologization not only violated bodies but also forced them to adhere to stereotypical gender roles, which led to trans identities being subjected to a series of coercive dynamics regarding how they had to live in order to be recognized.

Essentialism
Another consequence is essentialism: how, for example, it is assumed that for a woman to be a woman, she must have a uterus, ovaries, the ability to conceive, and XX chromosomes, and for a man to be a man, he must have XY chromosomes and produce sperm. We can find this theme, essentialism, even in places where there is no longer pathologization.

In practice, in a country like Mexico, for example, gender identity recognition is granted through an administrative act: you no longer need to go to a judge, you don’t need a psychiatric diagnosis or interventions of any kind. But there is still an essentialism that generates discrimination: if a woman is going to be elected, she can’t be a trans woman. If affirmative action quotas are going to be established for women, trans women shouldn’t be there. If there are safe spaces, they aren’t for trans women. That is essentialism. Institutional mechanisms of exclusion continue to exist, and it must be said that sometimes they are so closed off that even, for example, in Mexico City, cases have been reported of women’s shelters that don’t even accept cisgender lesbian women, let alone trans women. That is exclusionary essentialism and leads to discriminatory practices.

THIS IS WHAT THE TRANS COMMUNITIES IN MEXICO HAVE DIAGNOSED: DESPITE THE PROGRESS MADE LEGALLY, SOCIAL PREJUDICE AND VIOLENCE HAVE NOT DIMINISHED

Violences
In Latin America, the third issue is transfeminicidal violence, which has led to a discussion about whether we should have a legal definition for transfemicide, like the one we have for femicide. And there is a regional discussion about whether this is desirable or not, about whether transfemicide should be included within the definition of femicide.

In Mexico, for example, in the state of Morelos, the definition of femicide includes transfemicide, but in Mexico City, these are two different criminal offenses. Both possibilities have been discussed in Latin America. There are also those who wonder if implementing criminal offenses would be the solution, given that most states are entering an authoritarian shift, and criminal law in general has been a tool that offers solutions that have been described as “punitive populism”. These solutions do not solve problems but rather strengthen the system of criminal law itself and the police state and end up violating human rights even further. There are Latin American trans activists who support the criminal offense of transfemicide, but others are more skeptical and urge caution regarding what could happen.

In Latin America, one of the major issues is that trans people face a great struggle accessing to work. This is particularly clear among trans women: at some point in their lives, eight out of ten trans women will engage in sex work simply because there are no other opportunities. Save for Argentina, which is the exception, the trans movement in Latin America is not pro-sex work abolitionist. Given the fact that so many trans women are sex workers, the reaction in Argentina was to call for the abolition of sex work, arguing that it demeans and exploits women. In the rest of Latin America, what movements have called for is the recognition and dignification of sex work so that it is not dangerous.

LEGAL FRAMEWORK VS. REALITY
The issue of access to employment is one of the most serious, but not the only one. The great irony is that Latin America is a region where many cutting-edge laws have been established—certainly not everywhere: there are countries, such as Peru, Honduras, and Paraguay, that have made virtually no progress. Argentina was a pioneer in the recognition of gender identity through an administrative process that did not require a trial, diagnosis, or intervention, and it was also a pioneer in the issue of trans identities in children and adolescents under eighteen. Mexico has followed suit: practically two out of three states now recognize self-perceived gender identity, which is considered gender self-determination, and about eight more states recognize the identities of transgender children—not many, but it is a step forward.

There are other laws: Mexico already has a federal law against the so-called “conversion therapies,” now known as SOGICE (an acronym for “ Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts”). We also have the law created by the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED), and we have the comprehensive human rights reform of 2011, one of the most protective legal frameworks. But the great tragedy is that none of these have translated into more respectful and less violent circumstances. This is what the trans communities in Mexico have diagnosed: despite the progress made legally, social prejudice and violence have not diminished. In 2024, we reached a record: there was an average of fifty transfemicides per year, which increased by a third in 2025: we reached eighty transfemicides.

Ilustration: Monserrat García Silva

ANTI-GENDER AND ANTI-RIGHTS STANCES
This was the context we were born in, but it has worsened in the last five to seven years with the emergence of the movement that in Mexico we call anti-gender and in other parts of Latin America, such as Colombia, anti-rights. It’s not just a movement opposed to the category of gender; it has other axes, including a link to the new right. What we see is that they oppose the rights of sexual and gender dissidences as well as the rights of women, but they also have racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agendas, and even go against the diversities of what we now know as neurodivergences [see UNAM Internacional 10, pp. 298-305]. In other words, it’s a movement with more faces than just the anti-gender issue.

Buenos Aires, November 17, 2018. Thousands of people celebrate the 27^th LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex and Queer) Pride March in Buenos Aires
Picture: Kaloian/Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación, 2018

In some ways, this new movement is a problem because, from the outset, it changes the right’s political action strategies. In Latin America, we had grown accustomed to a right-wing always based on a religious discourse, usually Catholic or Christian. These new movements adopt and employ the language of human rights and the language of science (I say “the language” because they are not necessarily interested in human rights frameworks or science), and they use them because they are secular languages ​​that are much more successful in societies with legal frameworks inspired by political liberalism. Their use of these languages ​​is a way of adapting to the changing times, and we can see it when they say things like, “I have the right to educate my children as I please,” a way of saying, “Don’t give them comprehensive sex education.” Strictly speaking, this violates the human rights of children and adolescents because it violates their sexual and reproductive rights, but putting it in rights-based language makes it more palatable to many audiences who consider it fair that parents have that power. It’s just language, not a deep commitment to the violation of the entirety of human rights. This language is used when defending religious freedom to discriminate or when defending freedom of expression to broadcast hate speech.

There is also an adoption of scientific language, especially the one concerning biology, arguing that they are not speaking from a place of faith or religion, but from a place of science, again simplifying what biology says. They argue, for example, that the nuclear family is a natural institution created by biological evolution, when, in reality, prehistoric hunter-gatherer clans were not nuclear families; they did not have the same structure or the same dynamics.

These forms of adaptation make anti-rights movements problematic because it’s much harder, for example, to accuse them of using hate speech, except in extreme cases like those of Trump or Milei, because what they’ve done is change the type of political emotions they employ. Before, they appealed directly to hatred, to disgust: “Trans women and sex workers are disgusting.” Now, we are portrayed as a threat, for example, to children when we’re accused of pedophilia; to women because we’re accused of harassing them; to families, to religion, to values... The effect of speaking in terms of threat is very serious because it makes people feel vulnerable and doesn’t generate empathy toward LGBT communities, especially the trans population; on the contrary, they respond violently because they feel they’re defending themselves.

In some countries, this has been found to lead to an increase in stochastic violence, a form of random violence perpetrated against a person for belonging to a certain social group. People attack trans people, especially trans women, feeling that they represent a threat to society and that the attacks are legitimate. At the same time, they paradoxically delegitimize gender studies and trans studies, accusing them of ideology. In this sense, they represent a much greater risk because they come hand in hand with the new authoritarianisms, in this conservative shift that many countries are experiencing. The United States is the best example, but not the only one: there is Argentina with Milei, Italy with Giorgia Meloni, Russia with Putin, Turkey, Hungary.

In all cases, anti-gender rhetoric is used to legitimize a populist narrative that claims we are a threat to families, to the nation, to children, and in some ways, we are the scapegoat for society’s problems. This not only legitimizes violence but can also jeopardize achievements. In the United States, we do see significant setbacks; in the United Kingdom, we saw it with the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on the biologically based legal definitions of “woman” and “gender,” which exclude trans women (see https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cp31qg4dx15o). In this context, the anti-gender movement does represent a problem because it intensifies an already precarious situation in terms of human rights violations. 

Meixco’s case is curious because we have an enormous legacy of structural violence: we see it with transfemicides, with inequality, the difficulty in accessing jobs; we also see it in the fact that the two trans women representatives who came to power experienced enormous political gender violence, not only from male representatives, but also from other women representatives. The paradox is that, at least now, we don’t have such a strong anti-gender movement. We do have actors in Mexican politics who champion these discourses, but when we compare Mexico’s situation with that of the United States, Argentina, or even Chile, which has a strengthening right wing, or Brazil, with a still very strong Bolsonarist right wing, well, Mexico isn’t in that situation.

THE NEW RIGHTS
CM: You’ve mentioned the word “new” a couple of times when talking about these right-wing movements: new right-wing movements. How new are they really? Are they qualitatively different from the ones we knew before the progressive conquests of a left-wing political framework that has advanced rights? How dangerous can they be for issues related to exclusion and intolerance?
SGM: They’re called the “new right” because they share a series of dynamics that differentiate them from the old Latin American right and even from the old global right. For example, the new right generally comes to power through democratic means, not through coups, which undoubtedly contrasts sharply with the era of coups in Latin America. Another difference is that the new right, in general, doesn’t have as strong a militaristic culture as European fascism or Latin American dictatorships.

The 30^th LGBTIQ+ Pride March
Picture: Iro Bosero, 2021

Another difference is that the old right-wing movements had an anti-communist discourse very characteristic of the Cold War, when the discourse of the great danger to the nation was communism. The new right-wing movements don’t do this, as they instead focus on “gender ideology” or the thesis of the “great racial replacement” of racialized people over white people, the “Islamization” of Europe. It’s as if the enemy no longer operates within what was, in the 20^th century, the First World versus Second World polarization, but now wields issues linked to identity.

There’s an element of continuity between the new and old right-wing movements. Sonia Corrêa, for example, a highly respected Brazilian academic, says that the new right-wing movements aren’t so new; they’re responses to the countercultural movements of the 1960s, when the second wave of the feminist movement, the LGBT movement, and the African-American civil rights movement emerged. At that time, demonstrations opposing these struggles began to appear, but they didn’t gain visibility until the 1990s, in a clear post-Cold War context, because it was toward the end of the Cold War that the discourse against gender perspectives gained strength.

It’s a well-known story, a response to the United Nations meetings in Cairo (International Conference on Population and Development, 1994) and Beijing (Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995), where  the use of gender discourse becomes institutionalized. With the fall of the socialist bloc, a vacuum was created that would be filled by conservative movements close to the Catholic Church in the case of Poland, and to the Orthodox Church in the case of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, which, since the 1990s, have begun to build bridges with American evangelical conservatism. So, it does make sense to talk about a new right, given the way these changes are taking place.

Beginning in the 1990s, the new right’s strategies began to globalize. It acted in a coordinated manner through events like CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), held in various parts of the world—the World Meeting of Families—and began to operate on a global scale, where funding and NGOs played a central role. This didn’t happen under the old right. They could have international exchanges, but they didn’t have NGOs or funders to support them.
The new right-wing movements represent the greatest risk for LGBT populations today, not because traditional forms of violence no longer matter—they still exist—but because they deprive us of the ability to confront the structural forms of violence that were already there and confront us with the need to develop a counter-narrative to them.

Santa Fe Pride March, Argentina, 2017
Picture: Titi Nicola, 2017

LINEA OF ACTION
CM: In this context, what is the agenda of the trans movements, of the rights movements? How can we actually implement the laws we have?
SGM:  At the beginning of August, I had the opportunity to go to Peru for a meeting of eleven Latin American social movements [see box]. There were people from every country in Latin America and the United States, except for Nicaragua, whose representatives couldn’t attend because they weren’t allowed to leave. Representatives included feminist, LGBT, anti-racist, anti-punitive-anti-prison, disability rights, Afro-diasporic, and Indigenous movements. The reason these eleven movements met on a Latin American scale is because it is believed that addressing this context requires, first and foremost, recognizing that there is a common enemy and that we must act in a coordinated manner, because all movements are affected, albeit in different ways. It is essential to understand how different populations are affected to understand the seriousness of the problem.

One of the first things is to act in a coordinated manner among social movements, recognizing that this is a problem affecting all social movements in the Americas, and that it will affect all populations. The second is to act regionally. A few years ago, especially in the LGBT movement, activism had focused too much on micropolitics: intervening in very small community spaces, on very niche issues. While it’s not about abandoning this, which is very important, it’s now clear that the micropolitics strategy as a method of advocacy is insufficient and that it’s necessary to have activism networks, not only to share diagnoses, but also to share tools that work. Things like these were discussed: acting regionally so that different social movements could act together and recognizing the narrative gaps we had left.

Intermovement Dialogue Meeting on Democracy: From Crisis to Action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se2Qm63LxHg

This was very important in trying to explain why there’s suddenly a sector of masculinities that has so overwhelmingly embraced this anti-gender discourse; why masculinism—the manosphere—has suddenly been so successful. And one of the things that was mentioned is that, by focusing on vulnerable populations, many social movements neglected the importance of creating narratives directed at men and men’s needs, and even neglected a matter as basic as what it means to be a man at a time when traditional masculinity has been pointed out as complicit in forms of violence and oppression.

While there had been some reflections on this topic within feminism and the LGBT movement for decades, in spaces like social media, basically on the internet, there were no narratives for men, and they were captured by the discourses of the manosphere that offered them a very antagonistic and anti-rights narrative to deal with this crisis. It was a narrative in the end; we hadn’t occupied this niche, we hadn’t realized its importance. This led to the capture of a significant segment of masculinities, of very young masculinities who are the ones who have a very intense online presence.

NARRATIVES
There are other strategies: there’s the work we do to intervene in the media regarding how narratives are created, both in news and in entertainment. A very clear example in the news is the use of narratives that sensationalize death. For example, when a trans woman is killed, the tabloid press has always been very prone to sensationalism and even a kind of re-victimization by talking about “a man dressed as a woman.” We need to create spaces where we can identify what in English we call misinformation: when someone is misinforming, it must be pointed out.

Narratives alone aren’t enough; we must identify and point out all the misinformation and disinformation, because the new right uses post-truth as a tool, both when it comes to portraying LGBT issues and the risk we pose (when they say, “They’re sick people, something happened to them”). All of this has to do with communication and information dynamics, especially—but not necessarily—on social media. In traditional media, journalists must also be trained to handle information.

We also need to create settings where the public and the media can dialogue. Sometimes journalists or the media themselves campaign around these phenomena of disinformation and post-truth, and when that happens, you can’t stop it simply by pointing out that the information is false: you need a forum.

Among the topics discussed in Lima, one of the most important is maintaining the structures we’ve built, the links between academia, organizations, social movements, and human rights organizations on the continent. The advancement of the rights of LGBT populations—of all people, not just trans people, but the entire LGBT community—has largely been due to the success of building alliances. Finally, there is civil and street resistance wherever necessary, and international pressure, which remains useful, from organizations such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the European Court.

The general notion is that we are in a particularly serious moment because this is not limited to one country, but is occurring in different countries around the world and represents a real danger to the rights of trans people and other groups as well.

---