Aurora Alvarez-Granados Ramírez is a transgender tour guide who leads journeys across Central America, threading queer and Indigenous history through landscapes that are usually reduced to a postcard. She guides for Intrepid and independently, and her work is changing what travel in this region can mean.

I came across this piece in Condé Nast Traveler and read it twice. On a week when so much of the news about trans people involves courts, bans, and battles, here is a story about someone simply building something. Something real, something generous, and something that will outlast any news cycle.

The article follows a group of travellers on a two-week journey from Nicaragua to Guatemala, with stops in Honduras and El Salvador. Aurora bounces into the courtyard in Granada in a crop top, greets everyone with a warm "Buenas!", and from that moment she is clearly the centre of gravity. The writer, a Chilean-American travelling with a dozen others ranging in age from 20 to 75, describes a guide who is funny and warm, who reads Mayan zodiac signs on bumpy bus rides, who harmonises with the radio while queuing, who dances when she thinks no one is clocking it. What strikes me most, reading this, is how fully herself Aurora is. After transitioning, she says, she felt a deeper connection to the world, and it is tourism that has let her channel that.

A region that does not make it easy

Aurora is clear-eyed about the context she operates in. LGBTQIA+ protections across Central America remain limited and unevenly applied. Misgendering is common. Safety depends on quickly reading whatever room you walk into. She says that trans people in this region do not yet have a seat at the table where they can be respected and loved as who they are. The "not yet" is hers, and I find it quietly powerful: it is the phrase of someone who has decided they are going to keep showing up regardless.

None of that stops her. In fact, it shapes how she guides. Her awareness of risk is precisely what makes her tours safe for everyone in the group, queer and straight alike. She knows which spaces are genuinely welcoming, which communities are worth visiting, and which stories are hers to tell and share. She takes the group to Reinas de la Noche Otrans in Guatemala City, an organisation providing free medical and mental health care to queer people. She introduces them to the drag scene. She brings them to Candyland by Teatro in Managua. She shows them that queer life in Central America is not just surviving; it is making art, building community, and thriving in the gaps the mainstream has not bothered to fill.

A story woven from many threads

What Aurora does brilliantly is refuse to let queer history sit at the margins of the places she visits. She draws the connections. The huipil, the traditional top worn by Indigenous Mayan women across the region, has become a symbol for trans women in Guatemala: an expression of gender identity and cultural pride together, worn by women who are claiming both. Aurora traces a lineage of resilient women through her own K'iche' Mayan heritage, women who kept households together during the Guatemalan Civil War, who introduced clean water to their communities, who passed their traditions down through generations. She places herself in that lineage, and it belongs to her.

Her Indigenous heritage also gives her a framework for gender that preexists the colonial one. She grew up being told, within her family, that every person carries both female and male energy and can access either at any time. That is not a modern Western idea about gender fluidity. That is an old idea, carried in a living culture. It is a reminder, if one were needed, that gender diversity is not something new or invented. It is something some cultures had language and space for long before others decided to make it controversial.

What she has built, and why it matters

Aurora did not have a guidebook for this. She says so herself: "Nobody has given me a guidebook for how to do it. But somebody has to put themselves out there. It's my moment." There is something I recognise in that. Trans people, again and again, have had to create the spaces they needed when those spaces did not exist. Aurora has created a version of travel that is culturally rich, safety-aware, historically honest, and joyful. She has built something that invites people in.

By the end of the trip described in the article, the group of fourteen is, as the writer puts it, a crew. There are real hugs. Wet eyes. A reluctance to leave. That is what happens when someone guides from the fullness of who they are rather than hiding any part of it. People feel it. They open up. They learn things they could not have learned from a standard itinerary, from a guide who had not lived what Aurora has lived.

I hope Aurora's work finds every person who needs it. And I hope it shows, in small but lasting ways, what becomes possible when trans people are given room to lead.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.