By Violeta Alegre* You've probably heard us, transvestites and trans people, say many times: "We're not included in our country's emotional agenda." When we talk about emotional agendas, we always emphasize the lack of interpellation regarding our deaths, of course, but also the lack of access to work, healthcare, and housing. Added to this list of shortcomings is another, more invisible or rendered invisible: who loves us trans people? Who wants to be our partner? We can't deny that things have progressed in Argentina, and, viewed in historical terms, quite rapidly. We owe all of this to the struggle of our great activists and militants for our rights and to a political situation that allowed us to think of ourselves as subjects of rights. One of them was Lohana Berkinks. And I think of her when I talk about emotional agendas, particularly regarding her participation in the television program Historias Debidas (Stories of Dues). When the interviewer asked her: " What would you want from the person who loved you and accompanied you in life?" Lohana responded: “I wish someone had loved me, that someone had loved us transvestites for who we are, and not for the reason we consume. It's a topic we don't take responsibility for talking about, and it's a step this society is missing .

Replaceable bodies

This is the step society is missing, specifically for masculinities. They can't escape us from consumption and from being "catalogue-like," as we are seen on websites offering ourselves as escorts, sexual services, or in porn videos. There, we are the "queens," "forbidden loves," and often we ourselves feed our egos from there, legitimizing ourselves because the guy chooses us because we're attractive, voluptuous, and well-endowed. But there, too, we are highly replaceable for a few inches. With trans women, they can't escape objectification and marketing. We might think that many men "are now daring," and yes, they are daring to expand their sexual universes, but in very rare exceptions, the emotional one, where the contempt continues to be repeated and we continue to add to the list of degradation of subjectivity. Our families despise us, we are despised in institutions, at work, and yet, from the postmodern separatist proposal of sex and affection, we continue to provide answers so that the reproduction of patriarchy has new arguments: "I've never done it, I'd like to try," "I want to deconstruct myself." But there remains only the porn film that subjectified sexual pleasure.

Free love or capitalist invention?

I can't help but feel the "free love" and "anti-monogamy" proposals as stages of freedom sold to us by capitalism. In this new stepping on our heels, or at least perhaps it's more difficult for us to think about ourselves, in terms of whether we really want to feel outside of it, in an identity that we had to separate, or were forced to separate almost EVERYTHING. At the same time, I believe that the revolution also comes from the body, but perhaps for many of us it means combining the love that was denied to us, where part of rebuilding self-esteem has to do with no longer accepting that we are objects of consumption, among other things that, as I mentioned, must repair an absent state.

The personal, the political

Virtual reality plays a role we can't ignore in this proposal: we meet, send photos, convince each other, and have sex. We can have a great night, with a nice dinner and a movie, and the next day be blocked from the same social network where 48 hours earlier we were the most desirable. I remember meeting a guy in his 20s on a social network, where we chatted for several nights until we decided to meet up. He hadn't had any experience with a trans woman (or at least that's what he said). The first encounter was at a café, where we chatted and had a lot of fun. We liked each other, ended up at the hotel closest to the café and had sex. Sex that was repeated over the next three days when each of us finished our activities.

Taking charge of desire

But he couldn't continue with "this game," as he called it. It was too much for him, no matter how "progressive" his background was, no matter how much deconstruction he was doing. We ended the relationship, but later, he appeared before me after work. And he said, "You can do something to stop liking me. I don't want to feel this way about you; I can't allow it." I was stunned, with no answers for him and several questions for myself. He understood that since he couldn't eliminate his desire, I had to do it for him. What was he asking of me?

Commercial love

From there, I began to think about the immense burden of hegemonic masculinities, where the ceiling is quite low when it comes to allowing oneself to feel with a trans woman, so they always place us and reposition us on the same plane. In turn, this reality places us in a place of complete disbelief in the ability to be lovable subjects, companions, someone to share life with. And we fall back into exploitative relationships, where the lack of room for love leads us to "sell" ourselves as objects. Because from there we feed our egos, from there we can respond to the desires of others, but hardly to our human needs. Like me, many companions can tell stories of love, of desire, of suffering in relationships that degrade us. I absolutely agree that we should think about relationships outside of heterosexuality., and basically how tasks are redistributed, possession, in what terms romantic love is posed, respect and the registration of the other. But I would be careful and carefully analyze the new proposals of capitalism in the links that sell us individuality and increasing commodification; we transvestites know about that. *Transvestite activist, consultant for the World Bank, teacher]]>