Theme: Visibility.
Date received: 23 April 2022.
Offline experiences of Transgender Day of Visibility
I will describe my experience of the last Trans Day of Visibility, which was very fruitful for me. I attended 4 sessions of symposium and had informal meetings with several people involved.
The first session was an overview of trans realities, with special emphasis on those excluded by the law: minors, non-binary people and foreigners. I chatted before and after the talks informally with the speakers and I was surprised for good with the foreign speaker, because what we knew about the law was complementary. I was also glad that the voice of minors and non-binary people was heard by those less acquainted to it, since those two talks combined into a good speech. Despite not purposely, it was very intersectional.
In the evening there was an opening event of the 3 following sessions scheduled for the next day. It was mostly speeches by politicians, with the only reply of the organization president, but it was relevant that they made promises in public that were published and they are now accountable to fulfill. The best part came in the informal meeting at a pub with representatives of different realities in our collective. I also had a good and unexpected interchange with a representative of our collective from a part I knew less.
The first session of the day after was focused on feminism and trans-inclusiveness. It was gratifying to listen to talks on feminism where TERFs were anathema, rather than artificially amplified. There was an interesting debate of the kinds of women coming from feminism that attack trans rights. One of the speakers was a politician who, for my surprise, mentioned the acronym as LGTBIAQ+. Seizing the opportunity, I started my question by thanking the inclusion of the A in the acronym and remembering the meaning of the A (asexual, aromantic and agender) for the sake of the audience, since there is a great overlap between asexual and trans people, but many ignore it and even somebody could even discover their orientation by my introduction. And, with this remark, I also got a public compromise with introducing asexuality in the law. This way I killed two birds with one stone.
The next session was focused on the collectives excluded from the law: minor, non-binary and migrant people. I had nothing to add there, because I felt included, but learn from the others and remark with claps what was well stated. Unfortunately there was no political representative to get public engagement from, something expected by those who had excluded us. But the TERFs did watch this session, spread lies about it and even harassed at least one of the speakers in public and unlawful ways. I hope that this TERF harassment is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
After a group lunch, the last session was devoted to the law. I learnt a great lesson from a professor of Constitutional Law: the Equal Rights principle doesn’t mean that we are all the same, but the right to be different without being less. This has a lot of deep consequences. There was also a high-rank politician whom I asked about the binarist law of higher rank, and she recognized that including non-binary people in the protection bill is only the first step of a series of legal reforms in order to actually exist in the law and be protected under it. I hadn’t attended the symposium to stay quiet.
So, I remind the politicians that their promises are public and recorded. Their credibility is at stake.
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