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MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay. Fanny Aguiar was a Uruguayan trans woman who died young, like many trans women in the country and across the continent. She was murdered by her partner on November 15, 2018, one month after the Uruguayan Parliament approved the comprehensive law for trans people, which seeks to guarantee their right not to be discriminated against or stigmatized.

murder is the latest of a transvestite-trans woman in Uruguay . Before that, there was the murder of Verónica Pecoy in 2016, and long before that, seven murders of trans women in their sex work spaces between 2011 and 2012. Most of them remain unpunished.

A hope for justice

But there's something that changed the course of Fanny's story as a trans woman: her family brought her case to public trial. For the first time in Uruguay, the Prosecutor's Office intends to convict the murderer of a trans person of femicide and hate crime based on sexual identity (or transvesticide), because until now, they were convicted of simple homicide.

In Latin America, the only case in which a country's justice system used the term "transvesticide" in a trial was the murder of transvestite activist Diana Sacayán in Argentina. Fanny Aguiar's case could be the second on the continent. Although the hearing was scheduled for February 8, it was postponed, and the date for the hearing is still unknown.

“Fanny had a life very similar to that of other trans women in Latin America.”

Josefina González is a communicator, trans activist, and member of the Interdisciplinary Advisory Team on Gender Dissidence or Sexual Diversity, which is advising the Prosecutor's Office in this case. We spoke with her about this historic trial.

– What is the importance of Fanny Aguiar's murder in Uruguay and in the region?
– The fact that a transfemicide case is being brought to trial is very important to us. It's the first time in the country that the family of a trans woman has initiated a public, oral trial for her murder. This didn't happen before; when a trans woman was murdered, the family didn't respond, didn't take responsibility, wasn't interested. It symbolizes all our dead, our murdered women rendered completely invisible. The civil right to name change is very contemporary in our country. Many of the murdered women died with other identities they didn't recognize; they were veiled under other names, because even their families didn't accept their identity.

– In these types of cases, it's very important to have a connection with the family.
– It's very important that the family initiated the lawsuit, because it's the family that's demanding justice, and that's not common in our community. In this case, Fanny's sister initiated it. It's important because we come from a time of invisibility and lack of voice, of not being subjects of law; we come from a time of being the social cesspool, the most vulnerable, the most murdered, the most violated, and we're still in that moment. For a family member to initiate a process like this speaks to access to justice and participation. For us, it's a case that marks a before and after; it shows a cultural and institutional transformation. It attempts to generate legal and systemic justice to frame these specific cases within concepts like femicide, but also to introduce legal concepts that don't exist at the regulatory level, such as transfemicide or hate crimes based on gender identity. This will generate jurisprudence; we will work with protocols and guidelines so that the judiciary has the resources and tools to address these incidents. It also seeks to generate social justice because it encompasses an entire process of violence that perpetuates itself on our bodies and our identities, the ultimate expression of violence being murder.

– Is Fanny's murder legally classified as femicide?
– No. The current classification for the murderers is aggravated homicide. The Prosecutor's Office is trying to make an argument for it to also be classified as femicide and a hate crime based on sexual identity. To do that, these concepts must be argued during the trial: why it was femicide, why it was a hate crime based on sexual identity, and also add the legally nonexistent concept of travesticide or transfemicide (they're the same thing), as was the case with the ruling for the murder of transvestite activist Diana Sacayán in Argentina . There was significant work by the Argentine transvestite social movement, which is why I spoke with the colleague who advised the Argentine Prosecutor's Office and established a link between the Argentine and Uruguayan prosecutors' offices. They met virtually and were left with more information and tools to delve deeper into this case, which practically has the same characteristics as Diana's.

– What are the arguments for claiming transfemicide or travesticide?
– Fanny was stabbed 50 times with a 20-centimeter knife in the face, back, chest, jugular vein, and other parts of her body. There was cruelty toward her body. There are tools and information to support the claim that it was a transgender murder and that her identity played a role in the murder. And, as the prosecutor in charge of the case said, the killer (her partner) was deeply troubled by her being a trans woman. In his statements, he said he didn't accept that she had a penis because he saw her as a woman. He has a constant need to reaffirm his masculinity by declaring that when they had sex, he played the man and penetrated her. There's a distancing from Fanny's identity and corporeality. His family didn't accept her either; they stopped speaking to him, and they actually only dated for two months. There was a question of resistance, of non-acceptance, and of distancing themselves from that bond. I've read the interviews with psychologists and psychiatric experts, and he always emphasizes that, to him, she was a woman, but then suddenly he refers to her as a man and calls her a man. You realize his conceptual shortcomings regarding sexual orientation, sexual identity, and what it means to be a trans woman. He felt repulsed by her identity, even denied it. And that's how most people think about identity construction.

– Does the murderer plead guilty?
– Yes, although he uses his problematic drug use as an excuse. The case went like this: he was with a friend doing cocaine base for two days. They took a taxi from Piedras Blancas (a neighborhood in northwest Montevideo) to her apartment to ask for money to continue using drugs. She sometimes gave him money; they even did drugs together. They went up to the apartment and argued because she refused to lend him the money. The friend got out, and when he came back up, he was already killing her. Her boyfriend delayed coming down because he was looking for the money, and went down with her purse and a 13-kilogram gas canister. They murdered and robbed her. The police arrived because the neighbors had called about her screams, and they were caught immediately. He admitted to the crime, but justified it by saying that the drugs made him violent, and the friend said he had nothing to do with it.

– How does the killer's excuse of being high on drugs affect this case?
– The killer uses this argument to disassociate himself from the crime. This responds to their psychological and psychiatric profiles, which are linked to their life histories. They have personalities in which they don't take responsibility for their actions, they always blame others, and they seek blame outside. Due to their upbringings, their socio-familial, economic, and emotional situations, they developed into adults who don't feel empathy or assume responsibility for their actions because they didn't have the appropriate maturing processes. Although it doesn't justify their committing this murder, it must be taken into account that their lives have been difficult; they come from an accumulation of violence. They never had therapy to get rid of drugs. Even the killer's friend was imprisoned for a situation of violence he perpetrated against a partner. Families fail, society fails, and institutions fail. The system produces these situations, and it's time to address it from a legal perspective. The law doesn't look at how the system produces crime, murderers, and violent men and women. It only looks at the application of the law and the imposition of penalties.

– What can you tell us about Fanny Aguiar's life?
– Fanny was 37 years old when she was murdered. She was a sex worker in Spain, then returned and continued sex work in Uruguay. She practiced Umbandism, so she has a close emotional relationship with the trans woman Rihanna (a trans woman who was Fanny's spiritual mother, a practitioner of Umbandism, a religion that originates in Brazil and has many followers in Uruguay), who was one of the most important witnesses in the trial. She was her spiritual mother; they loved each other very much. Fanny had a life very similar to other trans women in Latin America. She was murdered young, she was a sex worker, she wasn't connected to a social or political network that she could refer to, but she did have connections with other colleagues through religious practice.

– Why do you think I wasn't part of any LGBTIQ+ community?
– That's very common for several reasons. First, because we live day to day, especially those who work in the sex industry. They don't have real time in their lives to connect with spaces that demand time, during hours when they usually rest, because they work at night or work all day in apartments. They don't have time to think, to build collectively, to question themselves. This is historical for us; we've always not been collectivized because life passes us by. And second, because it doesn't matter; people who think politically have that privilege; the rest of us don't have the training, the tools, or the access to collective spaces. Collectivizing implies working on the "we," the "we." It implies questioning myself, problematizing issues that affect me, what violence I reproduce. And we already suffer enough pain without inflicting more pain on ourselves.

– What other transfemicides in Uruguay have achieved justice?
– Very few. For example, between 2011 and 2012, there were seven transvesticides: Andrea, Kiara, La Pochito, Casandra, Gabriela, La Brasilera, and Pamela. Only two have perpetrators; the other five went unpunished. All were sex workers. There was cruelty toward those bodies, and the murders occurred in their workplaces: parks, streets, forests. One of them had her legs burned; another was found in a well. These murders were relevant because they made the news, but there were many others of our kind who were killed by the system: neglect, abandonment, lack of access, being outside the boundaries of legality. A form of institutional murder. We have many dead women for whom the state and society are responsible. Most of them died sick and young, as a result of violence, prison, beatings, deprivation of liberty, abuse, rape, and bribery demands. Their bodies deteriorated from exposure to sex work, certain climatic conditions, and substance use to sustain their jobs. You die before you physically die. We also need to discuss these deaths, and how the system is absent for those who have historically been outside the system in all its forms: institutional, legal, emotional, and relational.

This article was originally published in Pikara Magazine . To learn more about our partnership, click here .