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New research has shed light on Spain’s first transgender political organisation, a trailblazing collective that was launched in 1978 as its members grappled with the lingering persecution of the country’s four-decade dictatorship.
Founded in Barcelona, the Colectivo de Travestis y Transexuales, or Collective of Transvestis and Transexuals, sought to add its voice to the heated conversation playing out across Spain in the transition to democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
Meetings were held once a week, attracting about 20 members who pushed for rights such as gender recognition in the civil registry, said Iago Mora, a PhD researcher at King’s College London whose research recovered the collective’s story decades after it slid into obscurity.
“People were shocked to see that this existed in 1978,” he said. “They weren’t just gathering in private; they were taking to the streets, calling themselves transsexuals and travestis and holding banners that, for example, denounced their objectification and criticised the attitude of the Catholic church.”
Mora spent more than two years piecing together the collective’s history, speaking to former members and combing through archives and personal collections.
What he found was a glimpse of how trans people have long stood up to those who seek to weaponise their existence, offering a wider lens to a discussion that has again gripped the community as trans people face an increasingly difficult political reality.
“Much of the discourse that we’re increasingly seeing today presents trans people as a really modern invention,” said Mora. “But histories like these show that trans people have been here for a long time, have had to face significant challenges and have contested discourses that resemble those seen today.”
As Mora delved into the history of the collective, what emerged were the debates that had mobilised them. “They had clear ideas about the role they wished to play in the country’s transition to democracy and its broader social context. They also had specific demands regarding legal reform, job market exclusion, societal attitudes and cultural representation – areas that they saw as deeply interconnected.”
Looming over the collective’s actions was the shadow of the Franco dictatorship, during which thousands of LGBTQ+ people were jailed, sent to forced internment centres or locked up in institutions.
During much of the collective’s existence, the Franco-era laws remained in place, meaning its members took tremendous risks in speaking out, said Juan Martínez-Gil, an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on transgender representation during Spain’s transition to democracy.
“The legislation at the time still allowed for police intervention, so they ran the risk of being arrested and locked up,” said Martínez-Gil, who was not involved in the research on the collective.
At the time, trans people faced deep discrimination and often found themselves excluded from the labour market. Openly trans women were mostly limited to show business and prostitution, said Martínez-Gil. “In this sense, what Iago [Mora] is doing is very new, because he’s adding a new dimension to this, which is political activism.”
Much of what the collective accomplished was in making their presence seen and their demands heard, said Mora, citing photos that captured the members at landmark unauthorised demonstrations in the 1970s.
“They were prominent actors in the struggle against anti-homosexual legislation and police raids, and for the first time in the country, they articulated a political consciousness specifically around trans issues,” said Mora. “So I would say that’s an impact in and of itself, even if they didn’t manage to produce legislative change on things like the ID laws.”
It would take nearly 30 years, after renewed efforts from the movement, for Spain to usher in its first law in 2007 allowing for gender recognition on official ID, albeit under strict conditions.
Alongside the UK’s short-lived GLF Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group, launched in 1972, the Spanish collective was “new and pioneering” in Europe, being a public-facing political organisation, said Mora. Its emergence was made all the more notable given the decades of repression the community had lived through, he added.
Forged as an independent entity within a wider platform aimed at overturning anti-homosexual laws, the collective appeared to have been active for around two years.
While there is little explanation of why it ceased to exist, its end dovetailed with a broader demobilisation of social movements as Spain solidified its transition to democracy. This shift, along with a legal change that decriminalised homosexuality, led many in the wider community to feel as though their key objective had been accomplished, said Mora.
“This was not necessarily the case of the trans people involved here, but we have to bear in mind that they are a fairly small group compared to the gay movement as a whole,” Mora said. “And they relied on the support and mobilisation of their allies, who were far greater in number.”
The issues that the members of the collective faced were far from over, said Mora, citing the Franco-era crime of “public scandal” that remained enshrined in Spanish law until 1988. “Trans people continued to suffer intense repression through the 1980s, through both informal police harassment and the judicial persecution of these offences, as well as ongoing social and economic exclusion,” said Mora.
Mora described the collective’s activity as part of the wider story of how many in Spain had long battled for their rights, a story that at times clashes with the assumptions surrounding a country that is now seen as one of Europe’s leading lights when it comes to LGBTQ+ equality.
“People remark, especially from outside Spain: ‘It’s almost unbelievable how the country went from this authoritarian regime and deeply homophobic, Catholic country to being internationally leading in queer rights,’” said Mora. “But looking at experiences like this one shows us it wasn’t always a zero-to-everything trajectory. A vibrant, pioneering activist scene fought for many of these changes even while the regime’s anti-homosexual legislation was still in place.”
