By Pilar Salazar Illustration: Florencia Capella A few days ago, a well-known digital media outlet in Guatemala published an article advocating for “anti-feminism.” It's a rather inaccurate piece of writing, portraying feminism (which isn't a monolith) as a dogma, as violent as Islam or Judeo-Christianity. Meanwhile, a secret “sororo” group of women to which I was invited by a friend was establishing membership rules, and during that process, they put to the members' vote (myself included, a trans person) whether it was appropriate to include trans women. What they were questioning was whether or not we were women. I felt upset because there was a prevailing mentality that perceived trans women as a threat. My intention in writing this article is not to divide or attack the feminist movement, but rather to make visible how we are responding to these attacks in parallel with our daily actions. We're also going to coordinate collectively so as not to overstep the boundaries of other women whose struggles we don't know (by choice), and who, instead of contributing to the movement, can subtract or divide. It's hard to understand that trans women are also involved in feminist struggles; we're interested in many of the same struggles that intersect with those of cisgender women.

Trans-exclusionary radicals are not feminists

Viv Smyth called them TERFs, referring to "radical trans-exclusionary feminism," which refers to cisgender "feminist" women who believe that trans women are not women and that the feminist struggle does not belong to them. But I'm going to be rebellious and contradict this conceptualization, because in my opinion and that of many feminists, being "radical trans-exclusionary" is not a characteristic of feminism but rather a position that implicitly implies the biological device (relying on genitalia to categorize a gender identity). It has a baggage of cissexual logics that keep a blindfold on the privileges that give female cis-normativity the right to violently "decide" whether trans women can be women and be in the same spaces or not. It is paternalistic and at the same time exclusionary foolishness because there is no space or capacity to understand that women are diverse and that, in general, this part of transfeminine diversity is killed before turning 35 in Latin America. I believe that cisgender "feminist" movements' lack of awareness of the struggles of trans women is no longer a valid argument for ignoring and attacking. Many trans women and men are embracing the same struggles because we are also affected by abortion, street sexual harassment, and more.

Who are the political subjects of feminism?

Opening ourselves to dialogue and accepting that we haven't cared or that we have points to discuss is the first step to avoiding confrontation and division, which, as I've said, is a possibility that is coming to Central America in some spaces. There's little desire to ask, for example, a question as basic as the one proposed by Paul Preciado: who are the political subjects of feminism? It's no longer enough to say that to jump on board the fight against the patriarchal system and dismantle oppression, you have to have a vulva. I propose that we talk about intersectionalities and ask ourselves: who does the patriarchal system attack? Here I talk about feminized oppressed bodies. The axiom that a vulva equals a woman and a penis equals a man is broken by transsexuality or transgenderism, but also by the emergence of intersexuality, for example. And the disciplinary power of Western medicine gives death to one fiction and birth to another. Teresa de Lauretis said that, like sexuality, gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existing in human beings, but rather the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations. In the words of Michel Foucault, it is the deployment of a complex political technology.

Does it make sense to continue talking about feminism or feminisms?

To paraphrase Preciado: yes, as long as it is a way of combating the specific mechanisms of control, the production of sexual, racial, aesthetic, etc. subjectivities. The heterosexual matrix^[1] It attempts to reduce the multiplicity of bodies to masculinity and femininity from the perspective of genital politics, without taking into account that systems of oppression reach the peripheries of subaltern bodies.^[2]At this point I must say that I find it unethical and not at all sororal Ranting against trans women while defending feminism from violent men, arguing from a biological logic. It's important, and goes against these biases, to open up to dialogue and resolve doubts in order to strengthen, rather than divide, what has cost feminists so much. ^[1] Judith Butler, Gender in Dipusta, 1990. United States ^[2] Saurabh Dube, Subaltern Subjects, 2001 ]]>