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Photo: Presentes Archive

The Women and Diversity Commission of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies held its first virtual meeting to analyze various draft laws regarding access to and quotas for transgender and transvestite people in the workforce. Representatives from LGBTQ+ organizations participated.

Mónica Macha, president of the Women and Diversity Commission, is the driving force behind the measure, which currently encompasses three bills.

In the midst of the pandemic, measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19 have exposed the enormous difficulties faced by the trans and travesti community in making ends meet. Behind the countless urgent needs for food, and the difficulties in accessing healthcare, lies a basic right, essential for guaranteeing others, and one that has been systematically denied to this community: the right to employment.

[READ ALSO: Right to work: this is the transvestite-trans job quota in Argentina ]

The Transgender Employment Quota stems from the passage of a law in the Province of Buenos Aires, championed by human rights defender and transgender activist Amancay Diana Sacayán. This law mandates that the provincial public sector must employ transgender, transsexual, and gender-diverse individuals in at least one percent (1%) of its total workforce. The debate that will begin next week is part of her legacy, which we will honor by fighting to ensure that prostitution is not the imposed fate for all transgender and gender-diverse people.

“For us, the law is a tool for reparation. We need to be first-class citizens and stop being the outcasts of democracy,” said Maju Burgos, of Trans Women Argentina.

[READ ALSO: After 4 years, the transvestite and transgender employment quota law was regulated in the province of Buenos Aires ]

“As a trans man, and as a single father, my son has the right to have me provide him with the basic necessities that any teenager needs. Because they owe it to us, because we owe it to those who are no longer with us, and because they cannot continue to have this debt with the new generations of transvestites: We urgently need a transvestite employment quota law,” said Matias Veneziani, Coordinator of the transvestite adolescent group and Secretary of the Civil Association Infancias Libres (Free Childhoods).

According to a 2014 report by ATTTA and Fundación Huésped (the latest available), only 18% of transvestite and transgender people have had access to formal employment. With no options, excluded from education early on and often from their families, many of them resort to sex work or prostitution to survive.

[READ ALSO: Transvestites and trans people in quarantine: evictions and housing emergency ]

“The pandemic is hitting society as a whole, but it’s hitting the trans and travesti population the hardest because it directly prevents access to basic necessities. If a woman doesn’t go out and stand on a street corner at night, the next day she has no way to survive; she has nothing to eat or even medicine. And the only way for us to survive continues to be prostitution,” said Ivana Gutiérrez, a trans activist and leader with Conurbanes por la Diversidad (Suburbanites for Diversity).

 “With the passage of this bill, we are promoting an affirmative action measure by the Argentine State to correct and repair the historical discrimination against the trans community, understanding that this exclusion and violence has a structural character that requires strong state intervention to reverse it,” added Victoria Castro, Activist of the National Network 100% Diversity and Rights.

Representatives from the following organizations participated in the meeting: Convocatoria Federal Trans y Travesti de Argentina; Asociación Civil 100% Diversidad y Derechos; Asociación de Travestis, Transexuales y Transgéneros de Argentina (ATTTA); Organización Ser Trans; El Movimiento Antidiscriminatorio de Liberación (MAL); Frente por la Igualdad del Movimiento Evita y Fundación Travesti Trans de Chaco, among others.