Name: Keili Regina González

Identity: Trans

Candidacy: City Councillor

Political party: Socialist Workers' Movement (MST) within the Left and Workers' Front Unity (FITU)

List: 68

Position on the list: First

Why does a person from a diverse sexual/cultural background have to be in Congress or the Legislature?

Fighting in this arena allows me to see myself as a political subject capable of confronting the failed world left to us by traditional structures, a true reflection of patriarchy and entirely capitalist alliances within the governing fronts. I believe that these struggles must be combined, and that transvestites and trans people must never again be relegated to the sidelines. We want our voices to be heard and for the banking system to serve the struggles of workers, transfeminists, gender equality, and environmentalists.

When did you decide to run for office and why?

When I understood the denial by traditional, bourgeois, and capitalist parties of the coexistence of transvestites and trans people within their structures and in electoral political participation, I realized the reaffirmation of their perspective and, consequently, their reasons for not granting, denying, and limiting rights. Those who have governed us have been perfectly responsible for this. They need us to taint their spaces with progressivism, but they don't grant us any real opportunities.

How do you think hatred can be combated through politics?

Sweeping away cultural precepts rooted in the heterosexual matrix is ​​not possible from a micropolitical perspective, because they have no impact when we talk about communities and collectives that grew up on the margins of any livable life. Nor is it possible solely from a transvestite, trans, or gender perspective. We alone are not enough. I believe in the diversity of struggles that address particularities, but are tied to transversality and interconnectedness, primarily with the workers' struggle.

Did you think of any strategies to respond to the smear campaigns and disinformation against LGBT people in the media?

Being able to organize ourselves and have our voices be part of the process allows us to think of the body in action as a revolutionary act that makes explicit the need to transform everything. We will be fighters who transform ourselves and leaders who lend our voices and perspectives to building other worlds, so that clandestinity is never again our home.

How do we prevent a decline in rights?

As a working-class activist, feminist, trans-feminist, and socialist, I believe that the gender struggle alone has not been enough to advance the realization of many rights that have not yet been implemented due to a lack of will from the governments in power. I believe that the LGBT community, gender and sexual minorities, and gender-diverse people face an enormous challenge in the future.

What is the first project you are going to present?

I don't believe in a savior project. I believe in an active program, in existing on the political scene through organizing and building. It was difficult for trans women to transform vulnerability into a threat. I don't want others to continue doing politics for me, because I want to create and believe in another society, because I want to give voice to our struggles in decision-making spaces, and because the capitalist system has nothing to offer us. I am a socialist, and I want to start writing another story.

Recommendation

A film, song, book, or cultural experience that politically influenced you?

I think it's important to emphasize that, in terms of cultural consumption, trans women or those of us who grew up on the margins were often deprived of that possibility. So, those who embodied that, that political construction, in me as a political subject and in me as a leader of a space, as a militant, as an activist, were the art of speaking, of telling, of narrating—my comrades in everyday life.