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Dear Lohana and Diana,

A few years ago, you laid the cards on the table, grabbed the deck, shuffled, made the play, and dealt the cards. You shuffled, and when it was time to play the game, you poured a lot of transvestite love into it. The game had a goal, and it wasn't something that could strictly be considered a game: to finally stop our lives from falling apart in a heterosexual, sexist society. As a secret ingredient, you showed us how to weave and unweave. And that's how you taught us how to do it! 

I was a dirty-faced trans girl living with my family in Tucumán. And even though my head barely touched the edge of the table, I listened and took notes. Along with so many others, I learned to be a Trava, with a capital T. 

Diana, you took one of the first initiatives that weekend I'll never forget. When all this started, you charted the course we had to follow. I was already living in Buenos Aires. One weekend, you sat down and wrote down what the trans quota law should look like, taking notes with a pen and on binder paper. Then you laminated it, and I saw you wearing it around your neck everywhere, seeking support. 

Diana and Lohana, I am writing this letter to tell you that we finally have that law and it bears your name: Transvestite Trans Labor Quota and Inclusion Law “Diana Sacayán-Lohana Berkins. 

I want to tell you that after the National Congress voted for it by a landslide on Thursday, June 24th, a multitude of women of all stripes and colors took to the streets to celebrate together for transvestites, the long-awaited transvestite life project. "We are a queer power," I discovered. Just like when, in other, less happy times, we would protest against the injustices of the occasional change in the urban coexistence code, or a corrupt police commissioner who often tattooed the abuses of the police on our skin. 

I want to tell you that it was a beautiful day with a huge sun and a sky that deserves to be ours too.

There were also the crows, I saw them. When I think of the crows, I wonder from what nauseating hole their actions come, and at the same time I think they scare me more than the sirens, more than the cells and those dungeons where they keep calling us and shouting our names. The crows have names, you know them, but here and today they aren't so important. 

On Thursday, June 24, it became abundantly clear to society that we will never return to the dungeons and corners, just as you dreamed of and entrusted us to do in that very sad year of 2015. 

I'd like to tell you, Marikas, that on the night of June 24th, after the approval of the Trans Quota and Job Placement Law, my dad sent me a WhatsApp message at midnight. He said he was very proud of me and that he was going to sleep happy, because of where I had placed my last name in this society. Even in that, you were wise when you warned me that this would happen to me and to us one day, if we joined the fight. 

I want to tell you that from here, I can see and be privileged to observe how the transvestite life project is taking shape, in a society that is beginning to change. I want to tell you that the family no longer expels; it only accompanies in its own way, although it's true that this hasn't happened yet in the case of many of the transvestites. 

I want to tell you that the time of the revolution brought a paradigm shift, and the time is finally TODAY. 

Prostitution isn't going to be the only option for eating, living, laughing, and getting ahead. Biology isn't, and won't be, destiny. And the theory is that every day I'm going to be more trans, South American, migrant, brown, abortionist, poor, and indigenous. I feel very happy; everything they told us would happen has happened. The time has come for the transvestites and trans women in the barrios, the shantytowns, and the red-light districts. 

In a society that educates us to feel shame, transvestite pride is and must be collective. To continue transforming everything that's needed, to continue saying " Stop killing us ," to continue sowing and building that collective transvestite memory that belongs to all of us. Pride means attending the sixth march against transvesticide on June 28th and celebrating, for the first time, that we have a transvestite trans labor quota law.

Pride is thinking and building through politics for those who will come, for those who are here, and for those who have left. Pride is looking at the comrades who join politics every day, just as you, Diana and Lohana, taught us to do. With mistakes and successes, with spelling errors at times, with common and theoretical, trans-thinking words, that is Pride today. 

I promise to continue embracing and raising all the flags, as you always taught me. I promise to continue accompanying the first flights of this beautiful army of butterflies that you bequeathed us with so much transvestite love. Transvestite fury always! Beloved sisters, Diana and Lohana.