In the period of 1976-81, trans people in urban contexts in Spain engaged in political activism and played prominent roles in mass demonstrations and activist groups. The case of Barcelona’s Colectivo de Travestis y Transexuales (CTT, 1978-80) is particularly prominent insofar as it signals forms of politicization by trans people specifically around trans issues at an early historical moment even for Europe-wide standards.
This collective, the first of its kind to be documented in Spain, developed reflections on the specific oppression of travestis and transexuals (both relatively new concepts and identities at the time in Spain). They denounced societal hypocrisy and the continued police repression (until 1979, ‘homosexuality’ was a crime that was dealt with prison and internment in ‘reeducation centers’, and trans people continued to suffer persecution after that). In their texts we can see an emerging “transexual” political consciousness that cohabits with less binary modes of identification, such as references to a “third sex” travesti model. Outside of Barcelona, trans people were an active part of gay liberation groups in, at least, Galicia, Madrid, Andalusia and Valencia.
A look at the following generation of trans women in Spain, who lived in urban contexts during the 1980s, offers a stark contrast. The extreme harshness of everyday life, heightened by the arrival of the AIDS pandemic and the heroine crisis, seems to have left little to no space for political mobilization or organization according to their accounts. There are no clear channels of political communication between them and those who had lived the gay liberation activism of the Transition, and no trans groups are active in Spain until 1987 (Madrid) and 1992 (Barcelona).
In this paper I aim to explore some of the reasons why that rupture took place, focusing on the changes of political identities and temporalities from 1980 onwards, as the broader window of opportunity presented by the Transition started to narrow down significantly. Methodologically, I will rely on an extensive analysis of press appearances and activist documents from the time, which I combine with semi-structured interviews to trans people from both of these generations.
