Looking for How to Define Ourselves: Venue Shopping in Trans Activism

This article examines how trans activism in Mexico navigated institutional constraints through venue shopping to establish legal pathways for amending name and gender markers in birth certificates and identity documents, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with legislators, trans activists, human rights lawyers, and historians, the study employs a causal process-tracing approach to reconstruct the advocacy efforts to achieve judicial recognition. The analysis shows 1) that the meaning and administrative form of trans identity were collectively constructed through interactions between activists and state institutions in different stages; 2) that recognition advanced incrementally, as each institutional response addressed the limitations and unintended consequences of previous, partial forms of recognition, 3) that the judicial intervention emerged not as the result of a coordinated master plan, but from the convergence of decentralized and uncoordinated actions across multiple venues and actors. By tracing how claims were translated, reformulated, and adapted across legislative, bureaucratic, and judicial arenas, the article contributes to the literature on venue shopping and agenda setting by showing how advocacy processes shape identity itself, and how institutional constraints structure the boundaries of legal recognition. Moreover, this study contributes to understanding advocacy, not as a rational linear strategy, but as a fragmented process plenty of uncoordinated actions converging in an accidental but desire outcome.