Trans migrations or how travestis’ mobilities become acts of survival

Abstract

This chapter critically examines trans migration, moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks that equate mobility with safety, stability, and legal integration. Instead, it explores how trans people—particularly travesti sex workers from Brazil—engage in migration as a strategy of survival, resistance, and self-making. Drawing on ethnographic research, the analysis highlights how experiences of violence, exclusion, and precarious labor shape trans mobilities, while also emphasizing the agency and creativity embedded in these movements. It discusses the interplay between beauty, migration, and sex work, illustrating how travestis navigate global circuits of desirability and labor to assert their social intelligibility. Rather than portraying trans migration exclusively through victimhood or precarity, this study underscores how trans people negotiate conditions of uncertainty, constructing futures that also allow for moments of pleasure, recognition, and self-determination. By centering the lived experiences of trans migrants, the chapter offers a nuanced understanding of mobility as both constrained by structural violence and shaped by trans people’s aspirations for transformation and recognition.