Amidst the ongoing debate over the gender identity law in the Chilean Congress, which has already excluded transgender children, a campaign imported from Spain arrives in Santiago and Valparaíso: a bus circulating with transphobic propaganda and the phrase: “Boys have penises, girls have vulvas.” By Niki Raveau* Starting Monday, July 10, one of the saddest and most outrageous spectacles is coming: the “hate bus.” The powerful Spanish ultraconservative Catholic organization HazteOír will add the streets of Santiago and Valparaíso to its infamous international campaign, circulating a bus with transphobic propaganda. There is confusion in the press coverage, since the sensationalist vehicle is expressly targeting transgender children and not any LGBTI agenda. Therefore, it is important, given this incident, that large LGBTI organizations understand that the appropriate course of action is to create space for dialogue with communities that work with and support specific populations. In this case, transgender children. As Evelyn Silva, mother of Selenna, a trans girl, said, “however, people don’t know that there are buses, like that one, that pass through your life and the lives of trans children daily, and nobody signs petitions to stop them.”

Imported campaign

The European HazteOír, despite its considerable financial resources, is just as odious and ignorant as its local “opposition” counterparts. Specifically, it's a passenger bus operating as a mobile billboard. Printed on its sides is the phrase, “Boys have penises, girls have vulvas. Don't be fooled. If you're born a man, you're a man. If you're a woman, you'll stay a woman.” Another design proclaims, “Leave the children alone! Don't mess with my kids.” It's accompanied by two schematic figures, a “boy” and a “girl.” The bus began its route in response to a campaign by Chrysallis, an association of families of transgender minors based in Spain. The Chrysallis campaign consisted of posters displayed on buses and in metro stations in the Basque Country and Navarre, Spain. Against a white background is the Chrysallis illustration: four children running naked, holding hands. Two of them are transgender. The caption reads: “There are girls with penises and girls with vulvas. It’s that simple. Most suffer every day because society is unaware of this reality.”

They are not the wrong bodies

We support and value the great work Chrysallis does, but at this point, we believe we need to move beyond the focus on genitals. It's true that a large part of society still understands the trans experience as one of having the wrong bodies and genitals, and that for quite some time to come, we will have to educate people that this isn't the case. That trans people don't live with the wrong genitals. Even the few trans people who think that way about their genitals do so because society has taught them to. We all need to educate ourselves in more representative ways. Society is wrong, not trans genitals (it's also perfectly legitimate to have surgery and alter one's body. The point is to end the surgical market and the social pressure to modify the body). To educate about trans children, we prefer to focus, first and foremost, on ideas, on experience, on the whole body and its senses. Let's not forget that the genitalization of our experiences is a regulation of the outdated mental health manual. Let us not forget our other journeys—social, political, and poetic. Furthermore, there are intersex genitals that continue to be mutilated because they do not correspond to a penis or vulva.

Violation of rights

“This isn’t an attack on the adult LGBTI community; it’s a direct violation of the rights of trans children,” says Evelyn Silva, director of the Selenna Foundation, which supports trans children and youth in Santiago, Chile. Local media outlets reporting on the bus attack, which directly targets trans children, have largely ignored the perspectives of trans children in their coverage. Silva adds that HazteOír’s strategy is “an act of excessive violence against transgender children. The government should issue a statement, either through the National Council for Children or the General Secretariat of Government (Segegob), which has been reviewing the Gender Identity Law.” Pointing to the work that trans children's communities themselves have carried out with very little support from institutions, she concludes: “We already had to endure our children being left out of the law, due to the ineffectiveness of the strategies implemented over the last four years regarding the project. We have been working for quite some time as a community, on our own. And now, our children are being publicly violated, and the people who should be speaking out still haven't.”

Local politicians

At the last minute, the Minister Secretary General of the Government, Paula Narváez, made a statement. While she said that the Government does not endorse the content of the propaganda bus, He added that “We also understand that there is freedom to express different opinions in a democratic society"More empty opinions. More hatred. More ignorance and more spectacle. Minister Narváez's statements are scandalous and unacceptable, to say the least. In Madrid, however, the City Council stopped the bus for inciting hatred. We hope the Chilean government will rectify this. Let's hope the authorities and the public don't become complicit with this bus of deceit, hatred, and stupidity." *Historian and trans activist ]]>