Mariela Muñoz

Mariela Muñoz (24 December 19435 May 2017) was an Argentine transgender rights activist and politician. She raised twenty-three children over the course of her life. In 1997, she became the first trans woman to be officially recognized by the government of Argentina. She unsuccessfully sought the mayoralty of Quilmes and was active in the Justicialist Party and Renewal Party.

Early life Muñoz was born on 24 December 1943, in San Isidro de Lules. Much of her childhood was spent in Quilmes. Her father, formerly a sugarcane farmer, became a construction worker to support her and her three brothers. She was already very feminine as a child, and suffered harassment and corrective rape as a result. Her mother was against her femininity, and her father initially took her to prostitutes and psychiatrists as an attempt to change her mind, but he eventually became supportive of her and considered mortgaging their home to pay for her sex reassignment surgery.

When Muñoz became independent, she moved to the suburbs of Buenos Aires and began caring for adolescents, single mothers, and children. accusing her of having kidnapped them. Argentina would not pass the Gender Identity Law, which granted all transgender people the right to have their gender reflected on their identification, until fifteen years later. She then ran for provincial deputy with the Justicialist Party in 2003 and the Renewal Party in 2009, wanting to bring attention to the issue of diversity. She was not elected.

In 2013, after Muñoz had a stroke, a judge in Buenos Aires granted her a recurso de amparo so that the government would provide her with money in recognition of the discrimination she had faced. She was 70 years old at the time and did not have enough money to meet her basic needs. By the last year of Muñoz's life, she had suffered three strokes and relied on her adopted children to care for her. She died on 5 May 2017, in Greater Buenos Aires.