Trans activist Violeta Alegre writes about the femicide of Micaela García, describing the feelings of pain and powerlessness that overwhelmed her and her comrades last Saturday. “While they continue killing us, our bodies bear the collective wounds and inscribe them as our own.” By Violeta Alegre* Last Saturday, that cursed April 8, 2017, around eleven in the morning, I read the news in one of my WhatsApp groups confirming that Micaela García had been found, when in reality what was found was her body. Micaela's story had already spread throughout a shocked country that mourned her and succumbed once again to an immense failure, a failure that trans people know all too well, as we are constantly exposed to the gaze of male violence. Her body lies lifeless, her feminized body, her body inscribed and read as a woman of 21 years, an activist, socially committed, her body that, upon entering society, suffers inequalities simply for being. While they continue killing us, our bodies carry collective wounds and inscribe their own. Saturday wasn't just another death. It's never just another death, but we had that feeling. Perhaps it was the last straw, or that our bodies are becoming increasingly sensitive, or the frustration of thinking we weren't finding strategies to stop this. I don't know. [READ ALSO: #Argentina: drastic increase in transvesticides in 2016] But in any case, I agree with what Marisa Fournier, colleague and director of the Diploma in Gender, Politics and Participation at the National University of General Sarmiento, says: “I feel weariness and a certainty: to stop sexist violence, in addition to our persistent struggle in whatever sphere and place we find ourselves, it is necessary for men to literally break the male sexual contract. That they not feel attacked, threatened, or at risk when we take a collective and affirmative stance; that they can connect with their masculinities in a radically critical, intimate, and at the same time collective way; that they can recognize in patriarchy, patriarchal power and authority, the deepest root upon which all inequalities, all injustices, are built.” Perhaps, also, to all of the above is added that feeling of closeness, of friction, and it reminds us of when Diana Sacayán was murdered. When we learned of Diana's murder, a chill ran through us. Because it was a transvesticide with its own particular, cruel, macabre characteristics. But also because it was Diana, committed to the transvestite-trans cause to her very core. Our comrade.

[READ ALSO: Unpublished interview with Diana Sacayán: “I speak from the politicized transvestite core”]

I think this loss hits the women's movement, feminism, just as Diana's death hit us. Micaela was also a young woman committed to fighting gender violence. An activist. The fact is that last Saturday, from the trans and travesti collective, we emerged from the storm that battered us with wind and drenched us with even more fury. Pain, water, wind, and a collective embrace brought us together at the Obelisk on Saturday, uniting us beyond political parties, beyond our bodies, enraged, enveloped in songs and tears. We trans women, united in our struggles and in our alliance against the sexist violence suffered by women, are once again with our souls shattered. We were with Alma Fernández that night.With whom every furious cry pleaded for solace and justice to ease our suffering, to make us dream in the open air, to forge powerful alliances against that damned system that saddled us with another young woman, another life without a future, so that we may avenge. To avenge by educating, to avenge by shouting, to avenge by learning from the feminist movements we ask to ally ourselves with, so that we may envision ourselves as a whole and united. We often think: What if for every trans woman murdered or killed by state negligence we had this power, this upheaval in the streets? And today it is not so, we know. But that will never diminish our alliance with thousands of women who are victims of our same enemy. Micaela, your loss will pain us, and we will be imbued with trans fury to change reality, the reality of so many, our own. *Trans activist, teacher, consultant for the World Bank, with a diploma in Gender from the National University of General Sarmiento.

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