Re/Presenting Self & Other: Trans Deliverance in Caribbean Texts

As has been mentioned elsewhere, transvestism is a more than one hundred year-old tradition in Caribbean carnivals.^1,2 Characters such as the loca and the dame lorraine, both of which are men in women's dresses with padded or exaggerated breasts and buttocks, make regular, traditional appearances in the annual Festival de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza Aldea, Puerto Rico and the carnival celebrations in Trinidad, respectively. Tracing a history of "transgender" Caribbean identities outside of carnival performances is, however, much more difficult, though a tiny archive exists. Caribbean intellectual Frantz Fanon, not well-known for his liberal thinking regarding gender and sexuality, in his 1952 Peau noire, masques blancs (published in English in 1967 as Black Skin, White Masks), remarked in a footnote on the existence of what are called [in Martinique] men dressed like women or godmothers [Ma Commèré in the original]. Generally, they wear shirts and skirts. In the full quote he goes on to claim that he has not observed the overt presence of homosexuality in Martinique, and he insists that he is convinced that [Ma Commères] lead normal sex lives. They can take a punch like any he-man and they are not impervious to the allures of women (180). Although Fanon is consumed with the search for gender and sexual neuroses and pathologies, here he normalizes Martinican men dressed like women, while insisting that Ma Commères exhibit conventional masculinity in every way except that they often wear skirts.

More recently, and in a different country and context, mainstream press in Trinidad and Tobago (and several international outlets) reported Jowelle De Souzas successful court case. A Trinidadian trans woman who had a surgical sex change as a teenager, De Souza won a settlement against the Trinidadian state for unlawful arrest and police harassment and received some sympathetic local press coverage after she confronted a photographer for taking pictures of her without permission.³ Despite these few examples, unfortunately Caribbean trans lives and histories—especially those of biological women who flout gender norms—remain largely under-examined. Though popular and scholarly documentation and analysis of Caribbean unconventional genders is rare, it is not so difficult to hear about or see areas within or on the edges of urban areas where biological men who dress and/or live as women gathero—ften for prostitution (for instance in the Woodbrook area of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad). The presence of Caribbean trans persons in particular areas contributes to their perceived and enforced absence in the general population.

It is important to address the terminology I will use throughout this essay, and why I have made particular choices. I remain both ambivalent and conflicted about the use of the term transgender in Caribbean contexts because it originated in and seems to remain most relevant to North American and European contexts. The term transgender is typically attributed to Californian Virginia Prince, who coined it in the 1970s as a distinct alternative to both transvestite and transsexual. I have chosen not to use the term transsexual because it is still understood in relationship to surgical manipulation of the body. Transgender is currently defined in the United States as both an umbrella term for any number of transgressive gender practices and as a term which refers specifically to those who claim or exhibit unconventional gender but who are neither transvestites nor transsexuals.⁴ Increasingly, individuals in the United States who self-identify as transgender are utilizing surgery and hormones to alter their biology; thus it is a somewhat slippery term. But in the Caribbean such methods are sometimes more difficult to obtain, particularly for the express purpose of sex adjustment.

The history of the term transgender is further problematic for its application within the Caribbean because North Americans and Europeans have historically defined and continue to define Caribbeanness and especially Caribbean genders and sexualities in derogatory ways.⁵ Furthermore, since North America and Europe constitute dominant world powers, their descriptions and definitions of Caribbean sexuality are more prevalent globally than those coming from within the region. Therefore to use terms from...