“Was Sex Inflexible? Practices, Knowledge, Techniques, and Technologies of “Sex Change” Embodiment in Argentina during the Twentieth Century” explores the making of trans* bodies in Argentina during the twentieth century. More concretely, It (i) analyzes the history of a wide repertoire of medical and social practices such as gender affirmation surgeries, the self-injection of industrial silicone or hormones, among others; (ii) it examines the transformations of the notion of sex and the development of the multiple meanings that doctors, patients, social movements, sexual dissidents, writers, journalists, and judges assigned to it; and (iii) it establishes a connection between trans* embodiment practices and gender-normative technologies for cisgender men and women.
Argentina prohibited any intervention that led to sterilization from 1944 (decree N° 6216) and prohibited surgeries that affected reproductive organs from 1967 (law Nº 17132). Different legal codes had penalized homosexual and trans* public sociability from the 1930s onwards, with explicit condemnation of people who dressed as the “opposite sex”. This criminalisation transformed trans* people’s daily lives into public transgressions and threatened their right to existence. Moreover, criminalisation made sex change procedures clandestine, expensive and dangerous, contributing to the low life expectancy of trans people.
Through original archival research, interviews with the trans population and doctors specialized in gender affirmation treatment, and collaboration with grassroots organizations such as the Trans Memory Archive and Trans Women Argentina, this project shows how “sex change” practices and discourses played an important role in re-shaping the modern notion of sex as a central legal, medical, cultural and social bodily logic. It studies how sex changed due to the consolidation of medical fields such as endocrinology, the global circulation of sexology, the popularization of homemade technologies, and the rise of visible new sexual identities. This interaction made available new medical procedures for the first time, as some doctors who developed gender affirmation treatment were prohibited by law. Likewise, people who were seeking to transition to a new gender also developed homemade technologies and techniques with which to embody a new gender.
