On being transfeminist in México

A still from the 30: Thirty years of struggle against (trans)feminicide exhibit produced by the author at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City in 2023. Photo courtesy Lorena Wolffer.

Opinion • Lorena Wolffer • July 17, 2025 • Leer en castellano

Calling myself transfeminist is not just a political stance, it is a way of positioning myself in the world, a way of living in it.

I’ve been working on gender issues for more than 30 years—fighting for agency, voice, and rights for women, LGBTQIA+ communities and other gender dissidents—but it took me a long time to call myself a feminist.

I came to feminism and its many currents from a particular path: performance, which led me to question how my body and identity were constructed. Over the years, I began to embody performative habitats that upset or challenge gender mandates and the structures that produce and police them. Unlike now, identifying as a feminist back then was neither socially nor artistically acceptable, rather, it was an act of blunt disobedience inside and outside the confines of art.

It took time for me to understand that being a feminist is a verb in the present tense, one that is continually created and lived in. In a text I wrote about 10 years ago, I recognized that being a feminist meant confronting the world. 

Doing so entails living in a constant, embodied process of questioning, defiance, dissent, and resistance. It requires learning to detect, at all times, the multiple and changing systems of power that surround and police us in order to defy, refute, and dismantle them. Or, at least, to refuse to actively participate in them. 

I also expressed that, in my case, feminism also meant transforming my body into a vehicle for radical expression, storytelling, and visibility. Back then, I said that becoming a feminist—searching for fair, equitable, and non-hierarchical realities and relationships—also meant becoming a kind of conflict zone.

Against exclusionary violence 

As the years went by, I began to talk about feminisms in the plural, incorporating the crucial critiques of white western feminism and acknowledging a diversity of experiences and perspectives. 

From an intersectional standpoint, feminisms examine gender in relation to other systems of power and oppression. Eventually, I was able to understand the sex and gender binary as a regime that incites the types of violence that it refuses to acknowledge, except as a corollary issue. That knowledge led to my identifying as a queer/cuir person and not as a woman.

Calling myself a transfeminist today is an explicit response to the global rise and spread of transphobia, which argues that only cis women should be subjects of feminism, and that rights won for them should remain theirs alone. 

Until relatively recently, seemingly intractable fights within Mexico’s feminist movement focused mainly on debates around sex work and later expanded to include surrogacy.

“A Brief Chronology of Transphobia in Mexican Politics,” published in Nexos, traces early examples of feminist transphobia in the country to 2018. It  documents how transphobia spread, and the close relationship between radical trans-exclusionary feminists (TERF) and the right wing.

Within my own areas of action and practice, which include art and activism, I learned that some of my colleagues, former collaborators, and even people I had considered close friends began to position themselves as trans-exclusionary, resulting in political and emotional breaks, as well as new alignments.

This first happened in late August 2019, when a group of activists called for a roundtable at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, weeks after the occupation of Victoria Alada (formerly the Angel of Independence monument on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City) on August 16. That protest was held in response to the rape of two young women by police officers in Mexico City. 

Demonstrators made their way to the Angel of Independence, attacking a police station along the route. Then, they covered the base and stairs up to the monument with tags, slogans, and demands. Their symbolic occupation was crowned with a graffiti that read “Mexico feminicida” (“Mexico, perpetrator of femicides”). 

That collective action—which gave rise to the slogan “The police don't protect me, my friends do”—unleashed an absurd controversy. A significant part of the population—and the state itself—seemed more concerned with preserving monuments than with the lives of women.

We suggested coming together to understand the moment at hand. We worked to share and compare the demands different collectives had put forward, to respond to the criminalization of protest, and above all to propose how to fight the violence being perpetrated against us.

Initially, we convened this meeting under the name “Dialogue between cis + trans women in Mexico City: towards a shared agenda on our access to justice and our right to a life free of violence.” 

But at the last minute we changed the name to “Dialogue between all women” following an internal debate with another organizer who argued that “if we named trans women, we should do the same with all other women.” 

I disagreed and knew that by not explicitly naming trans women, they would not feel included and would not come. And that's exactly what happened.

Lessons learned 

Another learning moment occurred when DISIDENTA—the collective I co-run with Cerrucha and María Laura Rosa—organized "Shared desires: Possible feminist paths” at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center in 2022. The event brought 36 people together to reflect together, and imagine ways to eradicate systemic inequality and cisheteropatriarchal violence in Mexico, especially in Mexico City, where we work.

The premise was to bring together knowledge, perspectives, and experiences of people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to think through what we could do next as a collective action. 

With that in mind, we invited several activists who had spearheaded key actions in the feminist movement, despite the fact that they had publicly identified themselves as trans-exclusionary. 

On discovering the serious impact this had on a beloved trans comrade, who was a fellow participant in the event, we realized we had made a mistake. That led us to the resolve that it was and is not possible to dialogue with people who deny the existence of others, and who inflict the same violence they have experienced on other people.

We concluded that the way to recognize those who have made fundamental contributions to feminism but who today adopt hateful positions is to give them the credit they deserve, but without giving them a place at the table, or in our spaces.

In 2023, I pitched a project to the Museum of Memory and Tolerance that would compile the history of Mexico’s feminist struggles on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the first reports of femicides in Ciudad Juárez in 1993.

The project began with a thorough revision of archives by researcher and writer Emanuela Borzacchiello. Her work recovered the legacy of these struggles and invited feminists from all fields to record the actions they and others had carried out over the course of those three decades on a constellational timeline, creating a group exercise in feminist memory. Together, we decided to name the project 30: Thirty years of struggle against (trans)feminicide —consciously including transfeminicide and making our political stance known. 

We know that many did not attend precisely for that reason.

Going beyond, building other practices

Today, calling myself transfeminist not only transcends the sex-gender binary, is expands the territories of action of feminisms and recognizes as its subjects all of us who live outside those mandates or on their margins. In the words of the beloved Sayak Valencia:

"...it is a network that considers states of gender transition, migration, miscegenation, vulnerability, race, and class, to practice them as heirs to the historical memory of insurrectionary social movements. This is done with the aim of opening up spaces and discourse to these contemporary practices and subjects, and to emerging minorities that are not included by white, bioessentialist, and institutional hetero-feminism, which is to say, those who are left out of—or who strongly distance themselves from—the neoliberal capture of the critical apparatus of feminism, or what we know today as gender policies or ‘women's policies.’"

We go beyond this model by committing ourselves to completely dismantling gender and the cisheteropatriarchal culture that produces and sustains it. 

Instead, we seek other forms of coexistence, community, and encounter that are far removed from the systems and technologies of oppression and violence.