This session examines transnational queer activism and transgender activism ca. 1960s-2020 in the Americas. Panelists rethink how migration, tourism, medicine, public health and international circuits interrogated multipolar relations (North America-South America-Europe) and visibilized interconnections between activists collaborating to address the HIV/AIDS crisis and to increase access to transgender medicine while also interrogating U.S.-Mexican, U.S.-Brazilian, and Mexican-Canadian relations. In the first paper, Riley Wolfe examines the contradictory representations of Mexico in advertising and the queer press both as a queer utopia and as a homophobic site from the 1970s to the 1990s. Wolfe analyzes how U.S. and Canadian lesbian and gay activists and tourists both racialized and desired Mexicans, but also collaborated with them to combat homophobia and to strategize about HIV/AIDS activism. Alex Brandli also examines the work of queer activists in Mexico, focusing on the health advocacy of Mexican queer activists working to address the needs of transgender people and people living with HIV. Brandli examines how the experience of Mexican queer immigrants in the U.S. with transmedicine and HIV treatments informed how queer health advocates in Mexico strategized in their dealings with the state, but also how the activism in Mexico informed the Queer Mexican diaspora's efforts to engage in activism in the U.S. José Amador continues the theme of queer health advocacy, examining the case of transmedicine in Brazil during the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1964-1985. Amador focuses on how the military dictatorship impeded the development of transmedicine by prosecuting pioneer surgeon Dr. Roberto Farina in 1978, and how this forced Brazilians who sought gender-affirming treatment to seek alternative treatments. Amador probes the cases of two transsexual patients of Dr. Farina, examining how they organized, struggled, and persisted until Brazil legalized medical transitions in the late 1990s and discusses how state policies facilitated transitions for transwomen while the number of transmen remained limited. The final presentation, by Martín H. González Romero, explores the development of the Imperial Court System in Tijuana, Mexico and how it presents an interesting case of cross-border collaboration and conflict between important drag grassroots activists on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border who organized to raise funds for persons living with HIV and lobbied local governments. These four papers are pioneers in their field and are among the first works to benefit from the recently organized community archival projects in the global south as well as on interviews with activists. They endeavor to show that the Global South engaged both regionally and abroad, and that networks of Latin American queers outside of the region remained engage with developments in Latin America and both transmitted to activists in Mexico and Brazil knowledge of developments elsewhere, but also applied to their struggle abroad the lessons learned in Latin America. The session will be of interest to scholars of international relations, LGBTQ+, medicine, and informal diplomacy examining how NGOs work across borders. The papers also compare and contrast of how transmedicine public policy developed within Latin America and in relationship to transmedicine outside of the region.