BUENOS AIRES, Argentina >> Julieta González stepped inside the blocky white building where the Argentine military dictatorship held her for a month, and the flashbacks began.

Blood stains on the mattresses. Hearing screaming as she was inside her cell. Being forced to wash blood out of cars. The endless sexual abuse.

Transgender women like González often pretended to be asleep when a guard appeared in the middle of the night, she remembered.

“I was always the one who bore the brunt,” González, 65, told AP journalists during a visit to the cell where she was held. “I was younger.”

González and four other transgender women testified at the trial of former security officers in April on charges of crimes against humanity, part of what human-rights lawyers and activists call Argentina’s long-overdue effort to recognize the suffering of the trans community under military rule from 1976 to 1983. Members of the community took part in a demonstration last month in support of a bill under discussion in a congressional committee that would provide a lifetime pension for trans people over 40.

Patricia Alexandra Rivas, 56, said at the demonstration that she was raped and tortured while illegally detained for five days in 1981, when she was 14.

The people who did the dictatorship’s dirty work were particularly brutal to members of the trans community, which continued to suffer after the return of democracy in 1983. But things have been changing in Argentina: More than a decade ago, the country approved a landmark gender-identity law that allowed people to change their gender on documents without permission. More recently, Congress passed a law that reserves 1% of public sector jobs for trans individuals.

“They were brought to this place, tortured, raped, subjected to slave labor, deprived of their freedom and then released,” assistant prosecutor Ana Oberlin said while standing outside a set of cells at the Banfield Pit, a suburban former police station that was one of hundreds of illegal detention and torture centers in the capital.

Military rule engulfed much of Latin America in the 1970s and ‘80s and human rights organizations say some 30,000 people were illegally detained and disappeared without a trace in Argentina. Until recently, little was said about how the trans community suffered under the military rulers.

Part of the reason why the recognition has taken so long is because violence against members of the trans community, “is completely normalized,” said Marlene Wayar, 53, a transgender activist and author who gave expert testimony at the trial.

This dynamic largely played out in the 296 trials relating to dictatorship-era crimes against humanity that have taken place since 2006, after amnesty laws were struck down, in which 1115 people have been convicted, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

It’s only recently that Argentina has begun discussing gender roles and sexual mores under the dictatorship, Oberlin said, including a “model of family that laid out the role that men and women must play.”

Oberlin played a key role in including the testimony of the five transgender women who were held in the Banfield Pit as part of a trial that started in 2020, in which 12 officers are facing crimes against humanity charges for actions that took place in three clandestine detention centers involving some 700 victims.

Violence at the hands of security forces was something that González was used to when she and other trans women were detained by police in 1977 or 1978 — she doesn’t remember the exact date — while working as prostitutes. They ended up in the Banfield Pit.

“They pick us up, and I didn’t want to get in the truck, so he hit me on the back with a rifle like this, grabbed me by the hair, ‘Of course you’re going inside,’” González recalled.