Our colleague, the regional parliamentarian and president of the PSC-PSOE, María Dolores Padrón, has defended in the Parliament of the Canary Islands a Bill of non-discrimination based on gender identity and recognition of transsexual people, with the unanimous support of all groups.
This is a regulation whose objective is to guarantee the recognition of people who socially adopt a gender different from the one at birth and receive from the public administrations of the Canary Islands comprehensive and adequate attention to their medical, psychological, legal and other needs, on equal terms with the rest of the citizens and regardless of the island or municipality in which they reside.
This law is yet another example of the capacity of institutions, in this case the Parliament of the Canary Islands, to make us equal, to build an increasingly just society in which no one suffers any kind of discrimination.
In times when it seems that politics is going in a completely different direction from the needs of the people, laws like this demonstrate the very important role that Politics (with a capital letter) plays in our lives.
People trapped in a sexual identity that they do not recognize as their own now see their right to adopt the gender with which they perceive themselves recognized, without this being a reason for discrimination, with the protection and guardianship of public institutions.
It is true that this is a minority group, but the quality of democracy is measured precisely by the treatment received by minorities, by people who, being different, must be treated equally.
The Law defended by our colleague María Dolores Padrón therefore constitutes not only an achievement of exceptional importance but an example of enormous value, on the role that institutions must play to guarantee real equality and bring to the practical field those constitutional principles that make us equal from the point of view of the law, but which are worthless if they are not specified in regulations like this.
As a socialist, I am proud of the work of my colleague and my party. I am proud to be a member of a political force that carries in its DNA the passion for equality and that accumulates in its history a brilliant trajectory in defense of equality.
I am proud that the modernization of Spain and its integration into the European concert have been led by socialist governments and I do not want to forget that this modernization, this Europeanization, has not only referred to economic development, to the improvement of quality of life standards, or food safety or so many other examples of modernity.
Thanks to laws like this, Spain has become one of the countries with the highest level of social cohesion, at least until the arrival of the cuts, which laid the foundations of public, free and universal education and health, which decriminalized abortion and allowed divorce, equal marriage or the rights of dependents.
I am proud to be a socialist because I am aware that inequality and social imbalances are not only radically unfair to those who suffer them, they are factors that deteriorate coexistence and generate instability, discomfort and finally exclusion.
The only way to face these risks is with the determined commitment to equality that the PSOE has always exhibited.
Isaías González Rijo, Secretary of Social Movements of the Island Executive