Transvestites and trans people marched in Paraná to demand real labor policies
"We demand the reinstatement of our colleagues who were dismissed from the Municipality."
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Photos: Anabella Dalinger
Yesterday afternoon, Wednesday, January 15th, in Paraná, activists, political groups, social organizations, and unions marched from the Government House to City Hall. We demanded that the mayor of the capital of Entre Ríos, Adán Bahl, reinstate our dismissed trans and gender-diverse colleagues. This was not just another event; it was the first march organized against the mayor, who has been in office since December 10, 2019. This demonstrates the strength of the LGBTQ+ community when we organize and unify our demands.
We met again, embracing and singing, shouting, fighting, strengthened, because we refuse to be the scapegoats of any government. We want to be part of the decisions that will improve our lives. That's why we dragged our bodies along the streets so they know they won't remove us, because our rights are not negotiable. We demand the real implementation of the job quota in the municipality of Paraná.
Discursive policies or tackling the problem?
After the march, we had to read statements from officials who played the victim, saying that "the work they're doing to address the problem is extensive, but that's the direction they're headed." Meanwhile, they continue to condemn us to extreme poverty, vulnerability, loneliness, the scars of abuse, and systematic violence. Despair grips us every night.
The debts that the State, society, and history owe us must be placed on the agenda of priorities. We demand that they abandon their false rhetoric when speaking about us, because when they do, it is for their own benefit. They have an urgent need to develop and implement public labor policies and concrete actions, together with us, that address the risks of their omission and inaction, because our lives remain in danger.
[READ ALSO: Judge in Paraná ordered the Municipality to reinstate trans workers ]
The excuse is the municipality's financial situation. Interests have to be addressed, and those of us in the worst circumstances shouldn't always have to pay the price. We want politicians, who have non-delegable responsibilities, to relinquish their privileges and live like most workers, earning the same as a school administrator, using public hospitals, and sending their children to public schools. Even then, their lives would be far more comfortable than ours, since we still don't have access to the public system, and even if we do, we don't stay in it. Freezing their exorbitant salaries isn't enough.
It is unacceptable that, simultaneously with this violation of rights, the "Municipal Area of Women, Gender and Diversity" is created, and that the only response is to guarantee food parcels. These are comrades who are sitting there thanks to our struggles.
Their complicity with the State oppresses and denies our rights, consequently depriving us of the possibility of living in better conditions. They speak for us against us, believing it is our fault that we are living the way we are. It is their twisted worldview that condemns us, humiliates us, sickens us, and makes us disappear.
What does this fight teach us?
We understand transfeminism as the movement that aims to sustain and give continuity to social and political struggles. In a counter-hegemonic way, we design methodologies for our survival, but not only that. Because we understand that our goal is to create alliances with all those identities that do not dismiss sexuality and recognize the coexistence of our bodies.
This struggle must be waged from a place of love, in the streets, repoliticizing the feminism of gender and sexual dissidence, building a critical perspective against a State that has been the instrument of political domination that violates our rights and deprives us of the possibility of living in dignified conditions.
We must fight against the capitalist logic in which we find ourselves, developing a counter-offensive whose political imagination defends other forms of representation, other forms of sexuality, other ways of living.
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