2023-04-23 22:04:43
Marlene Wayar continues to be moved by what happened last Tuesday in the courts of La Plata, when five members of the transvestite and trans collective testified as survivors of crimes once morest humanity of the last dictatorship. If during her testimony, as a witness in the context, she stated that the genocide “was successful” in relation to the group that she is part of and whose human rights she is an activist, in this interview with Page 12 highlights that the testimonies of the compañeras mean the possibility of “healing”: “We were so excluded and so disbelieving in the exercise of Justice and that our voices might be heard. Our permanent exercise was always to forget. This is going to begin to invite us to remember to heal ”, he defined.
Wayar is a fundamental reference of local and regional transvestite and trans activism. At the beginning of her testimony before the Federal Oral Court 1 of La Plata, she introduced herself as a ceramist, a practitioner “for many years” of prostitution, a social psychologist, researcher, and writer. He mentioned that he received two honoris causa (National University of Rosario and National University of Mar del Plata), that he began to “activate” while he was still a prostitute, that he participated in the formation of several cooperatives of transvestites-trans for work and housing, that She was also active in the feminist field, which published two books: “Travesti: a good enough theory”, by Many Nuts, and “Travesti fury. Dictionary from T to T”, by Paidós.
The assistant prosecutor Ana Oberlin summoned her to testify because of this tour, but above all because of Wayar’s ability to give a framework to the stories that preceded her and that made history in the process of judging genocides. Of the five witnesses with whom she shared an audience, Wayar only knew one, Julieta González, from the Trans Memory Archive. “But to cross it, just. I did not know her story, ”she said in dialogue with this newspaper.
–What did you know regarding the persecution of the collective during the dictatorship?
–What the transvestites with whom I grew up in Córdoba commented. I was born in ’68, and I am the heritage of that time. I went out into the public space, into life, in ’83. Argentina was returning to democracy. They were the experiences of the generation that preceded me, the ones that took care of us, who had many yeites, many fears. They were intra-community stories, they didn’t come out because the word transvestite was totally discredited. They came out in comments between us, almost the tenor of an urban legend. Over time, with activism, we began to try to reconstruct the repression once morest dissidence, not only once morest the transvestite trans transsexual community, using the works of Jorge Salessi, the militancy and the denunciation of Carlos Jauregui and the listening of Marshall as threads. Meyer, to make a story possible.
–- During your testimony you pointed out that transvestites were displaced from the social body during the dictatorship. Because?
— The objective of an oppressive force is to change pre-existing social relations to establish new ones. In the case of the dissident population, the dictatorship comes to intensify a stigmatization that had already been occurring, which had already implemented the religious discourse. It intensifies from the criminological side, with the installation of social panic, moral terror, that we were dangerous beings, and also with the pathological one, that we had mental problems. Anyway, beings who deserved to be controlled, biased, taken to open-air concentration camps, I said, certain areas of the social territories, exterminated, with the aim of preserving the family man, worker, Christian.
– The genocidal force itself speaks of the fact that it carried out a “war once morest subversion”: what was the subversion of gender and gender dissidents regarding?
— The subversion of disobeying ethical morality, Christian values, the heteronorm. The exercise of subversion in the case of transvestites was not clandestine or hidden. The forces should not have done intelligence to find them because the body gave them away. these bodies, hypervisible, they were a daily attack. They are bodies that should not exist. The armed forces grant absolute discretion to the local police, as if the transvestite trans transsexual population was not important enough for them to get their hands dirty, as political militants were, the unions, the students. It was good for the police, it inflated their egos, the feeling of power, impunity and also the cash: with the money they stole from transvestites in prostitution they put together a petty cash.
Q: Do you think there was a before and following the dictatorship in terms of persecution of the transsexual transvestite collective?
— We have been exposed to a long continuum of violence as a community, but according to the accounts, the violence intensifies following the dictatorship. Because there is a labor force that remains accustomed to being one of the blood, to the impunity of doing what occurs to them without the danger of being questioned. A workforce that has been trained for this and is left without a task. The most vulnerable populations are the ones that are within easy reach to get their fill. The transvestite community was handed over to the Police. We were not the only ones, because we have also seen cruelty once morest men who had to leave their homes to work at dawn, with domestic workers, with immigrants, with the poor. But with us there was special cruelty because we did not have the power to denounce, to raise what we suffered socially. Our only tool once morest this violence was the possibility of being functional to their petty cash. So, to the extent that we handed over money and were docile, we had a little better time. Although we should systematically go to jail anyway, because the police had to justify statistics.
–In what sense do you consider that the genocide was successful with you, as you said during your testimony?
— Extremely successful. Our average lifespan today, statistically, is 32 years. There are no old transvestites in the social imaginary, there are no transvestites in the social imaginary who do not live by practicing prostitution. We wouldn’t be on the planet if it weren’t for the fact that we were still being born, if it weren’t for the fact that there are trans childhoods, that’s why we keep walking. I have said it on previous occasions: I have a cemetery in my head full of dead colleagues, all for preventable reasons, HIV, police violence, suicides, and this is the effect of the last dictatorshipa, from the stigma that was placed on us, that criminalized us, pathologised us even more. He enabled parents when a child displayed their gender expression, their desire for another identity, the first reaction was repression, and the second was expulsion onto the streets. Statistically, around the age of 13 we assumed our identity and at more or less the same age we turned to prostitution, due to force majeure, as a way of subsistence. This is only changing now, with organizations of fathers and mothers trying to understand and accompany their daughters and sons. But we continue to support Nazi messages from communicators, leaders, opinion makers whose intention is to continue fueling hatred once morest particular populations. I believe that the objective is not towards these populations, but rather to impose hatred as a way of bonding in general lines. If we hate each other and all that serves real power.
–Together with Valeria del Mar, Tuesday’s witnesses are the first transvestite-trans plaintiffs in the process of judging genocides of the last dictatorship. Their cases are likely to be the first to have a conviction. What consequences will their testimonies in court have for the rest of the group?
–This opens a door whose effects we can barely glimpse. The most immediate and concrete thing that the girls who testified are looking for is reparation. And from these testimonies, from this being able to speak, being able to recognize themselves before society as part of the population that suffered these crimes, they begin to enable the rest to ask themselves questions. We were so excluded and so disbelieved in the exercise of Justice and that our voices might be heard that until now they had never raised it. Our permanent exercise was always to forget. Forget the bad thing that happened to us. So, this is going to start inviting us to remember to heal. Memory was not a resource that we had at our fingertips. What happened on Tuesday enabled us, enabled us the right to the truth and a possibility of reparation: that there is someone who says publicly that what happened, that what happened to the testimonies in the trial and so many others, is unfair, it should not have happened to you: no one should have lost a son or daughter, no one should have been tortured or tortured, no one should have been raped or raped. All those tremendous events that endure, because they endure in democracy, kids are killed in the villas for being dark, kids are killed in the streets for wearing caps, bricklayers are killed in police stations for being poor.
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