Ecuadorian, Transgender, Migrant, Prostitute: Constructing an Identity beyond Binary Norms

This paper addresses migration, gender, and prostitution by studying the backgrounds of transgendered Ecuadorians living in Lille. The fabrication of the transgender identity, which corresponds to a “gender emptiness,” appears as a process in which different referential universes overlap: homosexuality, prostitution, and migration. This process of self-transmutation and of “self-conversion,” which is solved in the course of lengthy work on the identity, places transgendered people in a paradoxical situation: they are anchored in a desired sexual identity that could be to become a woman or to retain an undefined identity, in which getting closer to his/herself, imposes a necessary rupture with the family and leads to a marginalized life and to transgressions.