UC Irvine

Transgender and non-binary rights have emerged as one of the most rapidly evolving and politically contested areas of contemporary human rights, yet they remain comparatively understudied and are frequently subsumed within broader LGBTQ+ scholarship. Unlike many rights claims centered on equal access to existing institutions, transgender rights require states to reconsider the administrative and legal systems through which citizenship, identity, and personhood are recognized, making them a distinctive lens for examining institutional change. Latin America provides a particularly important setting for this analysis, having experienced some of the world's most significant advances in legal gender recognition alongside persistent violence, uneven public support, and growing political contestation. This dissertation examines how transgender and non-binary rights become institutionalized across legal, social, and political domains in Latin America. I argue that rights institutionalization is fundamentally multidimensional, unfolding through distinct yet interconnected processes of legal institutionalization, social institutionalization, and political institutionalization. Understanding transgender and non-binary rights therefore requires moving beyond legal adoption to examine how rights become socially legitimate, politically salient, and institutionally embedded.The dissertation employs a multi-method research design. Chapter 1 uses longitudinal data from the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP) to examine the expansion of transgender legal protections across nineteen Latin American countries between 2000 and 2021. The findings demonstrate substantial regional expansion characterized by uneven diffusion, institutional layering, and persistent cross-national divergence. Chapter 2 analyzes individual-level support for transgender and non-binary rights using the 2023 AmericasBarometer (LAPOP) survey across thirteen countries. The analysis finds that education, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status, and age emerged as the strongest predictors, while conventional left-right political ideology plays a comparatively limited role. Chapter 3 draws on the illustrative cases of Brazil and Bolivia to examine how movement visibility, political cleavages, and issue salience shape the political trajectories of transgender rights following legal reform. The analysis shows that comparable legal advances can generate markedly different political outcomes depending on how rights become publicly visible and politically salient.Together, the findings demonstrate that legal protections, public attitudes, and political contestation do not develop uniformly. Rather, transgender and non-binary rights evolve through uneven and interconnected processes that extend beyond formal legal recognition. By conceptualizing rights institutionalization as a multidimensional process, this dissertation advances scholarship on transgender and non-binary rights in three ways: it provides one of the first longitudinal comparative analyses of transgender-specific legal protections across Latin America; identifies the social foundations of public support for transgender and non-binary rights across thirteen countries; and demonstrates how political salience shapes the divergent trajectories of rights expansion following legal reform. More broadly, it integrates legal development, public opinion, and political contestation within a single theoretical framework, contributing to sociological understandings of human rights institutionalization, democratic inclusion, and institutional change.