Futurity

This autobiographical chapter describes the revolutionary trans activist who founded CasaNem, an LGBTQIA+ urban squatter effort that occupies unused buildings to repurpose them as trans housing collectives and centers for community education, health, and human rights promotion. The movement subverts normative economic transactions so often unchallenged in increasingly gentrified cities. The chapter highlights travesti, a gender identity in Brazil that refers to someone who identifies with the female gender but does not identify as a woman nor seek to change their genitalia. The word, highly stigmatized in the past, has been resignified by segments of the contemporary trans movement. Transvestigênere moves beyond travesti and transsexual—terms originally created by a cisgender society to refer to transgender bodies. The chapter serves as a manifesto for a squatter/occupation-based radical social movement, centering revolutionary notions of sex work and travesti sociability.