Trans Youth: Urban Portraits, Narratives, and Journeys in Mexico City. Doing Visual-Participatory Research

Transgender people are subject to a permanent moral and normalizing scrutiny that pathologizes and fetishizes their bodies, trying to subsume them in the cis-normative gender ideals. The “cispassing”, hostile practices in the medical and psychological fields, insecurity and fear in public transport, difficulties of access to safe toilets, and even the rejection - in various spaces - to be named according to their chosen pronouns and names, account for the multiple violences trans people experience and face daily.

This paper is based on a visual-participatory research on urban experiences carried out with diverse subaltern groups (trans youth, high-school students from disadvantaged neighborhoods, street vendors) in Mexico City. The visual and participatory character consisted of visual narrative workshops, where, using compact video-blog cameras distributed on a rotating basis among the participants, it was the young people themselves who decided what to say, what to show, where, and when. Our role as researchers was the support and follow-up for the construction of a visual narrative: what do I want to say and show (make visible) and to whom do I want to question.

Here I focus on the group of trans youth with whom we conducted a workshop of audiovisual narratives of 14 rounds during a year, in the context of which they gave an account of their experiences, spaces, and journeys through the city where they feel accepted/respected/recognized, and those that are hostile/discriminatory/ risky/dangerous. Schools and universities, access to health services, public transportation, recreational spaces, pride parades, trans-activism, fear in public toilets, were some of the topics chosen to account for spaces of exclusion and belonging. Videos, photos, poems, and animations produced and narrated by the young people themselves show the diversity of transgender experiences with their own bodies, in their daily interactions and journeys across the city.