This week in the Parliament of the Canary Islands, definitive steps have been taken to enter the final stretch of the long-awaited Law of Social Equality and Non-Discrimination based on Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sexual Characteristics, as the Board of the Committee on Social Rights, Equality, Diversity, and Youth has qualified and approved the amendments that were registered by the political groups.
Now, only the last step remains, the drafting phase, which, as the text is worked on, and with the level of consensus reached in the amendment process by the majority of the political forces in the Chamber, we are convinced that it will be a short process and that very soon we will be able to celebrate the birth of this long-awaited and necessary Trans Law in the Canary Islands.
A Law that should have been approved and in force for months, but the special circumstances of the year 2020, complicated and difficult in all areas - also in the parliamentary one - have slowed it down.
This delay has not been irrelevant, unfortunately, it has had negative consequences on trans and intersex people who have been waiting so long for this law, essential for the recognition of their rights, to finally see the light.
This is what different representatives of LGTBI associations, especially involved and committed to the need to guarantee, as soon as possible, the equal rights of trans and intersex people, have ratified to us this week with their presence in the appearances carried out in the Committee on Social Rights, Equality, Diversity, and Youth, as they have made clear both in the impulse and elaboration of the draft of the so-called 'Trans Law', as in the amendment process that has just ended this February.
Associations such as Gamá and Diversas, among others, are an example of organized civil society and an essential engine for those of us who, from public spaces, in this case the Parliament, have to collect and raise the demands of the citizens to whom we owe and represent.
The confinement and the consequences of the pandemic derived from the coronavirus have highlighted how in difficult times the most vulnerable people are even more stripped of their rights, even the most basic ones such as a roof and food; how exclusion widens and rages in people who were already on the margins and how suffering becomes even deeper and more heartbreaking.
The associations that work with LGTBI people know this very well, which is why it is so important to listen to them and for representatives of all political groups to have the opportunity to learn, first-hand, testimonies that are not always familiar to them.
We cannot ignore, as legislators, why, for what, and for whom we make the laws, to whom the words contained in an article are directed, what circumstances are hidden behind them, and I assure you that if we put a face to them, if we put a name to them, if we know and recognize their obstacles, their feelings, their pain, their enormous difficulties for full integration, perhaps our reticence would be less and our steps would be less slow.
We are living in strange and convulsive times in which trans people seem to be in the spotlight, singled out by an ideological current with some media influence that has decided to consider them a threat against women.
As if trans women had easy lives, as if they did not suffer all kinds of discrimination, as if they were not the ones who are at the end of almost everything good, and at the head of the worst, poor among the poorest, precarious among the most precarious, excluded among the most excluded.
I have seen little privilege in them, of all those I know only a minority, a very small minority, live dignified lives, enjoy a good profession and are respected as people. The majority are trapped in hard and difficult lives, and with very few possibilities of getting out.
No one who knows these realities can stand idly by and not understand that recognizing their full rights is a priority, that it is urgent, that we cannot wait any longer.
That while from our comfortable armchairs, or seats, we debate and get entangled in intellectual and essentialist debates about gender, they continue to live badly in miserable conditions, in many cases with prostitution as the only way out, drowned in hardships, loneliness, rejection and sadness. They continue to be denied, or like Iratxe they continue to be killed.
This law that is now entering its final stretch speaks of nothing other than that, the recognition of full rights for all, everyone, and everyone.
Neither more nor less.
María Del Río Sánchez
President of the Sí Podemos Canarias Parliamentary Group
President of the Committee on Social Rights,
Equality, Diversity and Youth
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