Further accounts demonstrate physical and symbolic violence targeting transgender women including physical assault, gender policing, and other transphobic actions. For example, one video evidenced three transgender women being publicly humiliated by the police, made to squat and bounce while forced to declare “I want to be a man, I want to be a man”. Policing of these laws has been particularly brutal among the Peruvian transgender community as documented by videos, photos, and comments circulating on social media. Gender restrictions were implemented within the existing national emergency which included country-wide curfews limiting any travel after 6 pm, enforced by the Peruvian armed forces and police Indeed, since implementation more than 50,000 people have been detained and then released for breaking these newly enacted laws. ![]() According to the Peruvian government, as of mid-April 2020 there were over 25,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and at least 700 people have died of complications related to COVID-19. This policy represented an escalation and the country’s most stringent legal measure to date in response to the urgent need to enforce physical distancing to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading faster than the Peruvian health system can respond. These restrictions were widely disseminated via the Government-sponsored messaging including infographics and circulated on various social media platforms, online newspapers and television news stations, and via printed pamphlets posted in public spaces routinely patrolled to ensure physical distancing. On Sunday no Peruvian citizens would be allowed to leave their homes. ![]() ![]() As described by Peru’s President Martín Vizcarra, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday only men can go out and on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday only women. In efforts to contain COVID-19, the Peruvian Government enacted a policy to restrict the mobility of its citizens based on gender. Further, the rise of transgender activism contesting these social policies alongside grassroots mobilization efforts underscore the critical role of civil society in promoting solidarity and social justice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ī closer assessment of the Peruvian case, quite unique in that a little over a week after implementation their gender-based policy was rescinded, illustrates how policies and the violence and suffering they fuel can also magnify HIV vulnerabilities impacting transgender communities. The implementation and policing of these binary, gender-based laws have also resulted in direct violence perpetrated against transgender communities. What about people and communities that exist outside of hegemonic understandings of binary gender presentation and identities? As has become clear these policies are not solely logistically problematic for transgender communities to negotiate. Meaning that on alternating days women are allowed to access essential services and on the other days, men. Panama, Peru, and Colombia (though only in Bogota) have legislated policies to enforce physical distancing by restricting the mobility of its citizens based on binary understandings of gender and associated norms. While rapid structural responses such as curfews, physical distancing protocols, and travel restrictions have greatly curtailed the spread of COVID-19 and effectively saved lives, we are also witnessing the alarming emergence of policies that enact and perpetuate violence against transgender communities. Globally the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease has laid bare the politics and social inequities that contribute to the elevated distribution of illness and mortality among socially marginalized communities.
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