One week last November Koddy, Paul and Johan were chained in front of the Ombudsman's Office in Caracas.
Thus, with extreme measures, they simply asked to be visible.
The protest demanded that transgender people be able to exercise their right to identity and not be discriminated against when requesting a name change, permitted under Venezuelan law, when it does not correspond to their gender expression.
They made enough noise to move some authorities who promised a small group this possibility.
But it has remained in the gesture and this Friday the LGBTIQ organizations have called for a new protest before the identification body in Venezuela.
“If I, like Prissila, who made my transition 22 years ago, am going to change my male name, they just slam the door,” says Prissila Solórzano, an activist with the NGO Kaleidoscopio Humano.
Article 146 of the Civil Registry Law establishes that "everyone may change their own name, for a single time, before the registrar or civil registrar when it is disgraceful, subjects them to public ridicule, violates their moral integrity, honor and reputation, or does not correspond to their gender, thus affecting the free development of their personality”.
This occurs despite the fact that this law has been enacted for more than 10 years since the Constitution prohibits any type of discrimination.
The fact that Venezuela has elected for the first time in Latin America a trans legislator, Tamara Adrián,
who was part of Parliament between 2016 and 2021, has not paved the way towards achieving that right.
Her request to change her name, like that of other trans people, are forgotten in the files of the Supreme Court of Justice, as far as the demands have had to go.
In 2017, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights affirmed in an advisory opinion that States must establish simple legal gender recognition procedures based on self-identification, without invasive or stigmatizing requirements such as medical examinations and evidence of sex reassignment surgeries.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee has also called on governments to guarantee the right to legal gender recognition.
But what Solórzano lives does not happen only in Venezuela.
Progressively there are countries that have advanced such as Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia or Costa Rica, but there are others in which the subject is not even discussed.
On Trans Visibility Day, it has become a demand that has united organizations from Venezuela, Honduras, Cuba and El Salvador to show that these countries are left behind through the Inclusive Trans platform.
The right to have an identity that corresponds to gender expression is a requirement that goes beyond a name change.
Well, it is the identity card, the main document of every citizen, the beginning of a spiral of discrimination that denies other rights such as education, health or decent work.
Prissila has two university degrees and has never been able to pursue their careers.
“In no company have they wanted me to work when they see my name and my gender expression.
Many times when I tried to apply I was mocked.
I know many young transgender people who have not been able to develop”, says the Venezuelan activist.
“The debt owed to us is quite big with trans people and we just want to be like everyone else.”
Setbacks in El Salvador
In El Salvador, two gender change sentences have been achieved in the documents, which the institutions have not complied with.
The Legislative Branch is in arrears with the mandate of the Supreme Court to create a procedure to allow the name change.
At least three trans women have sued the State for the denial of the right to identity, something that has forced several to leave their country and seek asylum in other countries in forced displacement.
In the historic 2020 sentence against three police officers for the murder of the sex worker Camila Díaz Córdova, in which the officials would be convicted of a hate crime, they were finally tried for homicide.
In recent years, they had begun to take steps to improve conditions for the LGBTIQ community, but Salvadoran activist Mónica Linares, from the Solidarity Association to Promote Human Development and Arcoiris Trans, says they have been detained after President Nayib came to power. Bukele.
“The president has said that abortion and same-sex marriage will never happen in El Salvador.
The identity law does not even mention it,” says Linares, whose organization is also a member of RedLacTrans.
Among the things that she does not mention is the elderly trans adults and trans children.
Nor do they count in the official data.
"The police, the Prosecutor's Office and Legal Medicine record the data of a homicide, for example, based on the genitals, that is, there are only those who have a penis or vagina."
Linares refers a few months ago a segment of sex education on state television that explained the concept of sexual orientation was censored.
In 2019 Bukele had already eliminated the Directorate for Sexual Diversity when he eliminated the Secretariat for Social Inclusion created in 2010. This setback translates into more than 100 human rights violations against the LGBTIQ community.
Within the framework of the exception plan that Bukele has undertaken in his war against gangs, they have also occurred.
“We know of cases of arbitrary arrests, exhibition of the bodies of trans women in a tabloid fashion and those who have been detained have also had their hair shaved, although hair does not make you a woman, it is an essential part of our construction of feminine identity.
And since we don't have a document that supports our identity,
Being Brenda Diaz
Colectivo Unidad Color Rosa has managed the emergency exit from the country of several trans women due to the situation of harassment and physical attacks due to their gender identity.
Others are part of the migrant caravans that cross the continent.
“Trans people in Honduras do not have opportunities, nor can we have decent work,” says activist Gabriela Redondo.
The Central American country is also in arrears with the establishment of mechanisms for the name change that should have started in May of last year.
Gabriela points out that during 2022, violations of the trans community exceeded at least 122 records, this being the most vulnerable group.
Last year Cuba approved equal marriage as a sign of progress.
It was the concession that the regime of Miguel Díaz Canel gave after the intense protests for the demand for rights and democracy that occurred in July 2021, clarifies Raul Soublett López from Estamos Contigo, an NGO that defends the LGBTIQ community in Cuba.
“We do not trust the true disposition of the State.
Within a month of its approval, several married couples denounced that the minutes continued to say that it was a marriage between a man and a woman.
As a result of the complaints, they updated the forms ”.
But in the case of trans people, for the activist, they are totally alone.
"In Parliament there is not even talk of a gender identity law."
This causes many people to repress their gender expression in order to continue their studies or access a job.
"That is totally normalized in Cuban society even when it is discrimination."
For example, Brenda Díaz had her gender expression forcibly removed.
She was detained in the 2021 protests that catapulted the slogan "Patria y Vida" and took her to a jail in Mayabeque.
They sent her to a prison for HIV-positive men, they shaved off her hair, and during the trial in which she was sentenced to 14 years in prison for throwing stones, they called her Freddy, the name she had as a child and which she also denies.