Being visible does not necessarily mean something that converts into healthy feedback. I have a bittersweet relationship with visibility, I tend to walk around the edges when I'm on the street, almost bumping into walls, as if I want to enter them and be invisible. I pretend not to be attentive to any sign that my identity has been noticed, it is obvious! I think, in fact, I'm pretty sure that the word "freak" is written on my forehead.
The price I pay when people observe and point out my transvestism is very high, I become the target of aggression, teasing and mockery. I discovered that it is easier to camouflage myself among those considered normal and try to live in peace.
"Look at your girlfriend passing by!" They scream at someone while hurting me together. The fingers that denounce me and are pointed at me announce a reality: it is a crime to be a transvestite. I mean, who knows, maybe criminals can gain greater social recognition!
Or even a classic case where an acquaintance claimed that she had shown photos of me to a cousin, wanting to ridicule him. "Pretty, right?" She asked before telling – "It's a transvestite!" Not everyone can say that they have seen transvestites during the day, society comes to believe that transvestites are nocturnal creatures. They leave the ground when it gets dark, go prostitution and return to the ground when the sun begins to rise. After all, the floor is the place previously determined for "people" like me.
I study at a college where I am considered by the students to be a foreign body that must be repelled. People reduce the higher education institution to a classroom and forget about corridors, squares, bathrooms and other areas. In all of them I can hear the whispers, the hands that are used to minimize them, the elbows that are pushed, the bulging eyes... Body expressions that whisper to me: this place is not for you.
When Jared Leto won the Oscar for playing Rayon, I immediately remembered the theaters of the past where men played women because their performance was prohibited, and black people who were mocked by white people in the abominable caricature known by the term "blackface".
Was there no trans person qualified to play that role? What about all the other films on the subject? How many were played by transvestites, transsexuals or transgender people? Two? One? Zero?
If we take the Brazilian media, we will have a long history of cis people parodying trans people in soap operas. In a recent case, a transvestite was called to play – amazingly – a prostitute. Because this is the dogmatic destiny of every transvestite, isn't it? There is no transvestite manager, teacher, cleaner, saleswoman or businesswoman. Imagine if they put a transvestite doctor in the soap opera? The reversal that this wouldn't give the viewer's mind!
"Who do these people on the margins think they are? Until yesterday they were on the corner! Now they want to say on TV that they can get a formal job?"
I was 18 years old when I watched Read T in one of her first interviews, until that moment I had internalized that my arrival point would be – in case of luck – the beauty salon. Seeing this person on television who shared a similar path made me hopeful, if she could occupy that space I could also occupy others.
Only I know how representation matters. However, I don't want to assume that the role of cis people should be restricted or that the role of trans people should be exclusively that, I would be creating an unwanted barrier. I just want to propose that our insertion occurs in a way that deconstructs the network of stereotypes that orbit around media spheres. May the lack – caused by transphobia – of transvestites, transsexuals and transgender people in public spaces be filled based on the notability of these people in places of dispute. May this visibility naturalize our presence, no longer causing traditional repulsion.
Great film, but it added nothing to my struggle. Jared Leto imitating a transvestite can only tell me – again – one thing, which we are not even good at interpreting our own existence.
