Alejandra Ironici, during a demonstration.@PSsantafe (RR. SS.)
Alejandra Ironici, 45, was murdered this Sunday night in the city of Santa Fe, in northeastern Argentina.
An emblem of the fight for LGBT rights, Ironici was the first transsexual woman to be recognized as such on her identity document without having to go to court.
The 2012 decree that ratified her identity was the spearhead of a decade of tireless militancy, in which she also managed to become an official of the Government of Santa Fe and the first transsexual teacher in the province's public system.
Her nephew found her lifeless body this Sunday, in the house they shared in the north of Santa Fe. The police have arrested the last couple of the activist: the man tried to set the house on fire and fled in his car victim.
Alejandra Ironici was a pioneer.
Two months before Argentina sanctioned the Gender Identity Law that regularized the procedure, she obtained a decree from the Government of the province of Santa Fe asking the Civil Registry to recognize her identity and change the gender of her identity card and her birth certificate. .
It was in March 2012. “All I did was choose a different life.
That conditioning meant that I was denied a lot of rights”, she said at the time and, after years of militancy for the recognition of her rights, the rest of her life and her struggle went through the public eye.
In October of that year, she began working as an administrative assistant in a hospital in her province and became the first transsexual woman to gain access to a public position through competition.
In 2013, she became the first neighborhood president elected in an assembly in the city of Santa Fe and was the first Argentinian trans woman to undergo sex reassignment surgery in a public hospital.
"We are legitimizing access to public health for trans partners," she defended before the operation, criticized by conservative sectors that did not accept that the public system paid for it as established by law.
Last year, Ironici again set a milestone: she was the first trans woman to gain access to a teaching position in the public system, teaching as a substitute.
The Santa Fe Prosecutor's Office investigates the case as transfeminicide.
According to local media, Ironici was found with burns and cuts on her body in the middle of a burning room.
The suspect in the murder, a 32-year-old man, was arrested Monday.
The victim's car was found 10 minutes from his house, in front of another address where the man was.
In the 10 years since Alejandra Ironici achieved recognition of her identity by the public system and Argentina sanctioned the Gender Identity Law, 12,655 people changed their identity documents to reflect their identity.
The collective advanced in the recognition of other rights, such as the labor quota law approved by the Senate in June of last year.
However, the violent death of one of its referents reflects the road that remains to be walked: the group has a life expectancy that does not exceed 40 years.
Alejandra Ironici was 43.
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