“Making Herself Up”: Transgender Embodiment and State Censorship in Mexico, 1952–2022

Jaime Humberto Hermosillo—Mexico’s most famous gay film director—self-produced “Las apariencias engañan” in 1977. Featuring a prominent travesti character named Adrianna, the film played with prevailing sexual and gendered norms by disaggregating sexuality from biological factors and presenting Adrianna as a woman, as desirable to heterosexual men. Despite casting popular cis-gender actress Isela Vega as Adriana, the film was censured by the government and ultimately banned until the presidential cabinet change in 1983. Though government actors attempted to curtail inclusive depictions of gender and sexual difference, representations of transgender, transsexual, and travesti communities as criminal and deviant proliferated in Mexican tabloids. Though marginalized, gender diversity in Mexico remained prominently visible throughout the twentieth century.

My paper focuses on how trans and travesti activists carved out space within both the emerging gay and lesbian movement of 1970s-1980s Mexico and the sensational press coverage that portrayed their bodies as dirty, ill, and criminal, to assert alternative expressions of gendered embodiment. I read their flaunting of biological gendered prescriptions within both heterosexual and homosexual communities as health advocacy—creating alternative modes of envisioning what constituted a healthy, gendered body. I draw on the persistent, rebellious, and disruptive visual and textual fragments left behind in archives despite continued violence and erasure. Notably, Mexico began performing gender affirming surgeries in 1954, a decade before the US, to prescribe and regulate ‘deviant’ homosexuality. In so doing, they inadvertently created space within Mexican legal and medical realms for gendered differences to proliferate. While most historical works on transgender communities examine how actors from Europe and the US shaped what contemporary transness looks like, my project explores Mexico’s imprint on global conceptions of transness.