Electoral parity with fake trans women in Mexico: number of LGBT candidacies is unprecedented
One party 'turns' 18 men into 18 women, which has outraged LGBTI collectives and feminists. There are precedents of such cheating in previous elections.
Gender identity has crept into the electoral campaign in Mexico, where in June elections will be held to renew the Houses of Parliament, appoint 15 state governors and thousands of City Councils. In the State of Tlaxcala, 18 men have registered as transsexual women to circumvent the sexual parity requirements imposed by law on candidacies, according to LGBTI collectives.
The electoral body of Tlaxcala warned the Fuerza por México party that it did not comply with gender parity and the 18 candidates who could not be men were replaced by another 18 using sexual identity self-ascription: they were already women.
This was not a problem, because it was enough with a piece of paper declaring themselves to be female to be allowed to present their electoral list. The matter is so crude that it has annoyed women and the transsexual collective. Now everyone is looking for a way to solve this in the future because it is not the first time this has happened. The same thing happened in Oaxaca in the 2018 elections, but then the electoral body prevented it.
Self-ascription, that is, the sole manifestation of a person on how he/she considers him/herself, man or woman, is not posing a problem only for sexual diversity. This week, a National Action Party (PAN) candidate declared him/herself indigenous to make his/her way onto the electoral lists. When asked by journalists what community [pueblo] the candidate belonged to, the only answer was that of Náhuatl.
And the candidate engaged in a blushing blah blah blah blah, but El Financiero journalist Verónica Bacaz did not back down. The candidate accused her of discrimination: "An indigenous person does not have to be one meter tall and have a different color complexion," the candidate argued. The reporter could not get him/her to say the name of the community: "It is a community in the State of Guerrero, it does not have to have a name," said Daniel Martínez Terrazas. The video has been the subject of all kinds of jokes.
The parties are obliged to include in their lists a certain number of indigenous people in 21 districts, Afro-Mexicans, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTI collective, the broadest expression for anyone who does not identify as heterosexual, which includes trans, transvestites, intersexuals... etcetera. In all cases, the parity balance between men and women must be respected.
But how to prove this is tricky in some cases: how does a gay man prove that he is gay, and a man born a man who considers himself a woman? Nor are those with disabilities happy with having to present a medical certificate. The men who have supposedly passed themselves off as women in Tlaxcala have shielded themselves in the privacy that the matter requires in order not to give their names. And the electoral body of said State, too.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) has been satisfied with the declarations of goodwill presumed to these people, but such bonhomie is not always such, as has been evidenced. Paola Jiménez Aguirre, the coordinator of the Mexican Network of Trans Women A. C., has denounced what has happened in Tlaxcala and will rush all judicial instances.
"They are violating the principle of parity in the parties and discriminating against women in our democratic exercise. In addition, it does not guarantee the participation of sexual diversity in Tlaxcala. It is a disgrace," she says. And she, like others consulted in this report, suspects that the trap is repeated in all parties and more than one Mexican state.
Source: El Pais
