Alex Trelinski
REGIONAL Trans and gay rights protection laws in the Community of Madrid were in effect repealed on Friday by the Partido Popular(PP) administration led by President Isabel Diaz Ayuso.
Hundreds of people have demonstrated in recent weeks against the changes, while the PP in Madrid countered by saying it is a simple ‘modification’ of regional regulations approved by consensus in 2016 after having listened to ‘experts and associations’.
Organisations that defend gay rights say that nobody in Ayuso’s government has wanted to meet them.
Ronny de la Cruz, president of COGAM said: “We asked for a meeting on October 2 and we are still waiting for them to deign to sit down with us”.
The PP however on Thursday welcomed members of the Amanda Group, a transphobic lobby that focuses on what they call ‘desistors’ – people who have made the transition and later regret it.
“They only want to listen to transphobic or ultra-Catholic people to support the barbarity they want to do,” said Encarni Bonilla, from trans group Chrysallis.
The LGTB+ Law is in effect emptied of most of its statutes and the Trans Law is stripped of its fundamental pillar: the concept of ‘gender self-determination’ or ‘freely expressed gender identification’ disappears from the norm.
“The previous rule recognised that only oneself could know what one’s identity was,” according to Isidro Garcia Nieto, a sexologist and social worker who took part in the drafting of the 2016 laws which have now been struck down.
In practical terms, regional documents like a health card or transport pass will no longer correspond to one’s gender identity, but rather to the legal sex registered on the DNI.
For example, children under 12 cannot have changes made and so a 10-year-old trans child may be forced to show the transport pass with the female name assigned to him at birth.
The new rule also says that in schools, if activities differentiated by sex are carried out, ‘the needs of the transsexual student will be guaranteed, without prejudice to the rights and privacy of other students, especially girls’.
In other words, the use of male or female changing rooms is at the discretion of the person responsible for the children at that time.
In addition, the plan against harassment of LGTB+ students in schools is eliminated and all content aimed at explaining LGTB+ matters and teacher training in the subject are removed from the course study syllabus.
Public media will not have to give visibility to sexual diversity and the Community of Madrid will not provide support to individual municipalities to offer programmes aimed at trans and gay groups.
The associations that defend the rights of LGTB+ people warn that the text of the law change by the Ayuso government represents an erasure of people from the group and a serious setback in their protection and recognition.
They say the Partido Popular has ‘definitively’ assumed the argument of the far right, removing, among other things, the reversal of the burden of proof- an instrument that they assure has been validated by several judicial rulings.
“In the reform that the PP has presented, gender self-determination is being repealed, it is talking about a transsexual condition, which is a very pathologising term,” said Ronny de la Cruz.
