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

Replaceable bodies

This is the step that society, and masculinities more specifically, are missing. They can't escape us from being consumed and "catalog-sized," as they see us on websites offering ourselves as escorts, sexual services, in porn videos. There we are "the queens," "the forbidden loves," and often we ourselves feed our egos from there, we legitimize ourselves, because the guy chooses us because we are attractive, voluptuous, well-endowed. But there, too, we are highly replaceable by a few centimeters. With trans women, they can't escape objectification, commodification. We might think that many men "are now daring," and yes, they are daring to expand their sexual universes, but in very rare exceptions, their emotional universes, where contempt continues and we keep adding to the list of the degradation of subjectivity. We are despised by our families, by institutions, by our jobs, and yet, from the postmodern, separatist perspective of sex and affection, we continue to provide answers that give the reproduction of patriarchy new justifications: “I’ve never done it, I’d like to try,” “I want to deconstruct myself.” But all that remains is the continuation of the pornographic narrative that subjectivized sexual pleasure.

Free love or capitalist invention?

I can't help but feel that "free love" and "anti-monogamy" proposals are stages of freedom sold to us by capitalism, in this new era of oppression, or at least perhaps it makes it harder for us to think about ourselves, about whether we truly want to feel outside of it, in an identity that we had to separate, or were forced to separate, from almost EVERYTHING. At the same time, I believe that the revolution also begins with the body, but perhaps for many of us it's about reclaiming the love that was denied us, where part of rebuilding self-esteem involves ceasing to accept that we are objects of consumption, among other things that, as I mentioned, this absent state must repair.

The personal, the political

The virtual world plays a role we can't ignore in this scenario. 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 on the same social network where, 48 hours earlier, we were the most desirable. I remember meeting a guy around 25 years old on a social network, where we chatted several nights until we decided to meet. He hadn't had any experience with a trans woman (or at least that's what he said). The first meeting was in a café, where we talked and had a lot of fun. We liked each other, ended up at the nearest hotel, and had sex. Sex that was repeated over the next three days after we finished our other activities.

Taking charge of the 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 he'd tried to deconstruct it. We ended the relationship, but some time later he showed up outside my workplace. 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 myself to." I was stunned, with no answer 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 started thinking about the immense burden that hegemonic masculinities have, where the ceiling is quite low when it comes to allowing oneself to feel with a trans person, so they always place and re-place us on the same plane. This reality, in turn, places us in a position of complete disbelief in our ability to be lovable subjects, companions, someone with whom to share life. And we fall back into exploitative relationships, where the lack of space 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 own human needs. Like me, countless women can recount stories of love, desire, and suffering in relationships that degrade us. I absolutely agree that we must think about relationships outside of heterosexuality, and basically how tasks are redistributed, possession, in what terms romantic love is framed, respect and the registration of the other. But I would be careful and thoroughly analyze the new proposals of capitalism in the relationships that sell us individuality and ever more commodification; we know the pitfalls of that. *Transvestite activist, consultant for the World Bank, teacher]]>