Liquid silicone, another variable of social transvesticide
Silvina Luna's death sparked various and necessary debates. In these debates, little or no attention was paid to the suffering of the transvestite and trans community as a result of these interventions.
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Last Thursday, Silvina Luna, the actress and host who was fighting for her life due to the effects of a type of acrylic called methacrylate . This caused hypercalcemia and kidney failure. In 2011, she was operated on by plastic surgeon Aníbal Lotocki, who has been accused of several malpractice complaints and is currently under house arrest.
Methacrylate and liquid silicone are well-known among transvestites. For decades, they've been used to mold bodies, giving shape to busts, hips, buttocks, cheekbones, forehead, chin, and even calves. They come in all sizes, from a quarter to a half to a half, creating the perfect figure. Whether you're the hottest transvestite or simply achieving what you long for, they're all about the ultimate body shape.
There are transvestites who have gone years without significant problems. But the foreign body migrates, swells, hurts in the winter, changes color, often causing irreversible problems in organs, tissues, and arteries. It affects health forever, and sometimes it's always too soon. Because what follows is death.
We transvestites know about exclusion, and that's how we learned about silicone. It's another variable of social transvesticide, the exclusion from institutions that should guarantee basic rights: the right to grow and develop without violence, education, health, housing. Popular iconography demands perfect bodies , objects that can give pleasure, no matter the price. And this short-sighted picture is countered by real life: the transvestite who loves you, the lesbian who takes care of you, the diverse queer.
Silvina's death has joined a list of preventable deaths, where transvestites are not a minority.
Patriarchy promotes these hegemonic body models and stereotypes that directly result in violence against our bodies. We are invited to question, problematize, and demand specific policies that comprehensively address the use of silicone, methacrylate, and other substances. We also call for the eradication of the binary stereotypes imposed on our bodies.
*Pía Ceballos is an Afro-indigenous transvestite activist from Salta from the Argentine MTA trans women movement.
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