Transgender Argentines Confront Continued Murder and Discrimination

Diana Sacayán was found tied up in a 13th-floor apartment in Buenos Aires in October, stabbed to death. A month earlier, Marcela Estefanía Chocobar, 26, was decapitated and her body dumped on a vacant lot in Río Gallegos, in Patagonia. Also in September, in Santa Fe, a city on Argentina’s Pampas lowlands, the corpse of Fernanda Olmos, 59, was discovered on her bedroom floor, a plastic bag pulled over her head. She had also been stabbed.

The unsolved killings of transgender women in recent weeks have jolted Argentina, prompting soul-searching in a country that has introduced some of the most liberal civil rights legislation in Latin America, but that critics say remains mired in conservative and macho attitudes toward gender identity.

“Society hasn’t changed in the slightest,” said Andrea Cantero, 29, a hairdresser who until last year was called Andrés. “We’re people like anybody else,” she added, “but I feel it was a message to say, ‘You’re worthless.’ ”

Ms. Cantero, who says she is regularly insulted and threatened over her gender identity, spoke at a recent march of gay and transgender Argentines. She had tied her hands and ankles with rope, painted blood stains on her skin and written on her chest, “Liberate us from violence.”

n recent years, legislators have passed a series of laws to protect the rights of transgender and gay people in Argentina. Although conservative attitudes on social issues persist and the Roman Catholic Church remains influential, the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has pushed for greater equality, seeing the issue as a crucial human rights concern. In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America to allow same-sex marriage.

Three years ago, legislators passed a groundbreaking gender identity law that allows people to change their gender without a psychiatric diagnosis or surgery. It also requires state health care and private insurers to provide hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery.

In Buenos Aires Province, Argentina’s most populous, lawmakers passed a bill in September that requires public sector employers to allocate 1 percent of jobs to transgender workers.

About 6,000 people, including a 6-year-old boy, have changed their gender on official documents in the last three years, compared with a handful before the 2012 law, said Esteban Paulón, president of the Argentine Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People.

Government ministries have in some cases supported transgender people searching for jobs by subsidizing wages and helping arrange medical attention.

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