This is the web version of Americanas, EL PAÍS América’s newsletter covering news and ideas from a gender perspective. If you would like To, you can do so using this link
In our opinion, there is hardly anything more disturbing than a man who proudly paints his lips red, wears colorful skirts with high heels and holds a fan with a rainbow flag. And when you see this young, vital man, whose presence is powerful in itself, comfortable and smiling, occupying a space like that of the electoral court of a historically conservative state, everything becomes more complex. Especially in the second largest country in Latin America with the most hate crimes.
Mexico is still a markedly homophobic and transphobic society. The sad and alarming numbers of hate crimes show this. After Brazil, Mexico is the place in Latin America where trans women and gay men are most likely to disappear, be murdered, attempt suicide and be driven to suicide, especially between the ages of 25 and 29.
At every public appearance, Ociel Baena Saucedo asked to be referred to as gender non-binary “elle” – people who do not identify with being a woman or a man and who understand gender as something more diverse. “I’m not the magistrate, I’m le magistrade, please,” he said again and again – he repeated it with a fatigue that was no longer even latent – to his interlocutors, who said, somewhat confused and with a certain nervousness: tried to continue the conversation . Although Ociel Baena was afraid, he never stopped denouncing discrimination, attacks and the terror of living in a world that constantly denied him his rights because of his personal preferences.
For many of us, who always try to write with the graceful treatment that circumstances demand of us, it still takes a lot to write or pronounce “le magistrade” and to perform the conjugations correctly. Yet every time we play an audio recording or an interview with Baena Saucedo and see again how he insists that his name be called the way he asked, we can do nothing but try to do the right thing do. And the right thing would be to respect his decision and appoint him as desired, because, moreover, his life, his long professional career and his example, now unfortunately converted into a legacy, were firmly based on world conquest, the effort to name him that way, as I wanted.
It is not an easy task for the media and the societies we belong to, but we are aware that the times in which we live force us to have this conversation. Not just in our newsrooms and classrooms, but to build open and receptive communication with the people out there who do us the great favor of reading us and perhaps sometimes subscribing to our content and listening to the activists and young people of all gender identifications – the after the violent death of Baena Saucedo – and also people who do not understand why the words should be changed, professors and academics, institutions specializing in the language and its future. This could be one of the first steps that journalists and media could take to accompany society on its path to human dignity.
Ociel Baena was right: There is no more pleasant and truly beautiful feeling than that the people around us treat us with respect, as a sign that others are there, not for us, but with us, accompanying us on this path Building society and the future in our hands. Respect for the otherness that lives in the people around us would then be an unshakable principle of dignity. I suspect the judge got it long before any of us did.
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