There are silences that dignify and words that portray. What happened with Francisco Javier Borrego, former magistrate of the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, is textbook material. He went up to a lectern, at a Vox event, and decided that the most intelligent thing he could contribute to the debate on gender identity was to ridicule trans people with a cheap joke: "My name is Francisca Javiera and I feel like a woman."
Bravo. An applause for this gentleman who, after decades in the judiciary, believes that making fun of vulnerable groups is the best way to justify his passage through history. We already knew that the robe is too big for him, but now dressing up as a stale buffoon is not surprising: the character is consistent with the scenario.
Irony, when brilliant, makes the power uncomfortable. His, on the other hand, makes anyone with a brain uncomfortable. Because while he turns the dignity of thousands of people into a joke, trans lives continue to be marked by discrimination, suicides, and the lack of real rights. And for a former judge to trivialize it is not a gag, it is a symptom: that of a caveman right that applauds these outbursts because they have too many rights.
Mr. Borrego, no one disputes your right to have an opinion, but the stench of contempt that your words distill. You are not in a bar or at a brother-in-law's after-dinner conversation, you were in Congress, where laws are supposed to be built to protect, not to humiliate.
Perhaps the problem is not that he feels "Francisca Javiera", but that he has never felt like a judge for everyone, but only for a few. Therefore, although his resume appears in golden letters, his legacy will remain in lowercase: that of someone who exchanged the scales of justice for the laughter of a retrograde audience.
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