There’s a small red backpack that I’ve carried around many protests I’ve covered over the past few years. On it, there’s a frayed and frankly grubby piece of white cloth holding on for dear life with a safety pin and haphazard stitches, with three words written in Sharpie: ¿Dónde está Tehuel? 

Tehuel de la Torre is a trans man who went missing on March 11, 2021. He was last seen at Luis Ramos’ house, a friend who had allegedly offered him a job as a waiter. Following a slow start to the initial investigation, police combed the area around Ramos’s house as well as Tehuel’s home neighborhood. A piece of burnt cloth identified as Tehuel’s coat, drops of his blood, and his destroyed cell phone led to the arrest of Ramos and another accomplice — a selfie of them with Tehuel is the last evidence of him alive. Nobody has seen or heard from him since. 

There was an initial uproar on social media, with the trans-travesti community exerting social pressure to find him, consistently asking ¿Dónde está Tehuel? (“Where is Tehuel?”).

As months and years have gone by, the Tehuel case has followed two paths at once: the search for Tehuel, and the murder trial for Ramos and his alleged accomplice.

Last month, more than three years after Tehuel’s disappearance, Ramos was convicted of his murder in Argentina’s first legally recognized case of trans-homicide — an aggravated murder in which the victim is targeted specifically for being a transgender man. 

The ruling was hailed as historic, but the triumphalism in the smattering of media coverage, statements, and social media posts rang hollow. As a trans person, it felt like I was expected to be overjoyed. Instead, I felt grief. I couldn’t celebrate and felt guilty that I couldn’t muster any relief in justice being served. Grappling with my feelings in the days since, a new one has come to the fore: anxiety that the verdict will act as a dampener.

When did our chants of “Where is Tehuel, the state is responsible” mutate into celebrating a life sentence? I know those things aren’t mutually exclusive. But the verdict and ensuing catchphrase Fue transhomicidio felt more like a death sentence for Tehuel than vindication for the trans-travesti community. A guilty verdict, and the important legal precedent it has established, might have felt like a relief if we knew for sure that Tehuel was murdered. But the painful truth is that we don’t know precisely what happened.

If we’re looking for Tehuel at all now, the hunt is for a dead body in the Buenos Aires neighborhood where he was last seen. And we’ve just potentially exhausted the strongest institutional channel for the search. How will the same judiciary that has just convicted someone of Tehuel’s murder also move forward with the case to find him alive? A case, by the way, that’s just been gathering dust?

Tehuel’s case has always touched a nerve, exposing the systemic violence that trans people face in Argentina. The bigotry he encountered as he struggled to find work. The fact that police initially searched for a woman when he went missing. The basic reality is that an entire community is being overlooked if not actively persecuted. 

Mainstream feminist organizations say Tehuel’s name during speeches at large marches, but very few attend specific trans-travesti protests. 

Two heartfelt premises have been central to the demands for justice — but I believe it’s time to challenge them because they contribute to Tehuel’s erasure.

The first is that he is a desaparecido — a term that usually refers to those forcibly kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the last military dictatorship. While the state is the main perpetrator of violence against the trans-travesti community and gender-based violence was integral to the dictatorship’s extermination plan, the parallels essentially end there. Tehuel is a specific kind of desaparecido, and the brutality his and other trans bodies have endured deserves a specific response spearheaded by the community.

By assuming Tehuel is dead — a safe assumption for political activists under the dictatorship — we shift the focus to clinching life sentences. While incarcerating repressors is the standard approach for relatives searching for unmarked graves decades after the fact, we still don’t know what happened to Tehuel. It’s jarring that the search for justice seems to be narrowing prematurely. Are we subversively using traditional channels, as we often have to, or are we being boxed in?

The second false premise is that any trans person could have suffered Tehuel’s fate. Speaking for myself, that is almost categorically untrue. Tehuel was a person of color living in poverty on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I’m white and have a steady job downtown. There are things we undoubtedly shared as people of trans experience, but our realities were extremely different. Not acknowledging that ignores the rank classism pervading the entire affair. I am far more than my gender identity and so was Tehuel. Of course, there are elements of truth to saying “We are all Tehuel” because many of us could — and do — experience aspects of what he went through. However, claiming that his fate could have happened to “any one of us” is a form of erasure that belittles the overlapping systemic brutalities he faced and definitely contributed to his disappearance.

There’s another narrative thorn I feel compelled to poke at. In the bid to tell Tehuel’s story and demand justice, his father has been practically removed from the picture. I can understand why: on top of insisting that Tehuel is alive, he doesn’t accept that Tehuel is transgender and insists he is a lesbian woman. I get how jarring that is but I have to question sidelining someone Tehuel lived with because it’s uncomfortable. 

Especially because being trans isn’t about fitting neatly into a narrative, and coming out is an intensely personal process — if only we could ask Tehuel. There’s a reason it’s a “transition,” we evolve alongside our loved ones as we better understand ourselves. Maybe a family member struggles with your new pronouns for a while but they still invite you to Sunday lunch — and for some, that can be enough. Tehuel’s father believes that he’s looking for his lesbian daughter but the point is that he’s still searching.

Earlier this year my mother saw the sign on my backpack and asked whether I had thought about embroidering those words. To be honest, I had, but it was meant to be temporary, just an improvised banner for a pride march. The simple act of embroidering felt like painful finality — but now that I’m worried about the search flagging, perhaps I should. The systemic violence the trans-travesti community faces can’t be removed by undoing a safety pin anyway and keeping the demand for a search alive may feel more like hope now.

I have Tehuel to thank, in part, for bringing me closer to my community. To me, his case is emblematic of the fact that being trans in this world is grief and joy inexorably intertwined, resistance held aloft by tenderness. 

On November 20, 2023, the trans-travesti community marched for International Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we commemorate those killed by anti-trans violence. President Javier Milei had just been elected. We walked from Plaza de Mayo to Congress bearing a gigantic trans flag with the names of those we’ve lost, chanting Aquí está la resistencia trans (“Here is the trans resistance”). There were tears and embraces. We lit candles in front of Congress and yelled Presente (“Here!”) after each name was read out, pages and pages as night fell. 

Tehuel’s name did not appear in that crushingly long roster — and despite the trans-homicide verdict, I don’t think it will this year because we’re still asking that central question. And you bet we yelled Dónde está Tehuel as we walked to Congress that day. Although institutionally there’s this strong temptation to neatly “close” a chapter with a verdict and traditional structures, we’re still writing. Or we should be — I know I am.