MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

LGTB+ Groups celebrate 31st Pride Day in Buenos Aires

President Alberto Fernández was happy to have helped the LGBT+ Community achieve the rights they had fought for

LGBTI+ groups marching through the streets of Buenos Aires on Gay Pride Celebration Day Saturday demanded broader anti-discrimination laws be broader and other regulations benefitting transgender people.

The Argentine Federation of LGBT people also defended the use of the so-called “Inclusive Language” which suppresses distinctions between male and female adjectives and nouns that are common in Spanish and need to be reversed to encompass everybody regardless of their sexual orientation. For example, the word “padres” can be translated both as parents of fathers, which sometimes leads to confusion as to whether the mothers were included or not.

“Alumnos” stands for male pupils and “alumnas” for female ones. The inclusive form would be “alumnes.” Yet, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, teachers have been banned from using the “inclusive” form and stick to the traditional male version which would include both genders.

This weekend demonstrators wanted that norm repealed, particularly in Argentina, a pioneering country in matters of anti-discrimination, gender identity, same-sex marriage, and transgender / transvestite labor rights and quotas.

The LGBT insisted on the need that the laws to be even more comprehensive against discrimination and that they include regulations in favor of trans people.

Buenos Aires turned rainbow colorful since late Friday as music bands, ribbons, and balloons were displayed all along between Casa Rosada and the Congress building.

“The Pride March is our Easter, our Christmas; an event that accumulates all the grace of Carnival. The world is subverted for a few hours in which, suddenly, none of our desires seem impossible and the abnormal is the other: heterosexist violence, complicit silence, and bad education. It is a party, yes, because in it we lose the shame that has been imposed on us and we mount the dance as a flag of struggle and political vindication,” the organizers claimed. By their assessment, over a million people participated in the event's 31st edition.

The Buenos Aires LGBTIQ+ Pride March is an annual event that has been held since 1992 to make visible the claims and conquests of the LGBTIQ+ community. Throughout the day, different activities take place along Avenida de Mayo at this time of the year to commemorate Nov. 1, 1967, when the Nuestro Mundo LGBT group was formed.

The organizers claimed that despite the Equal Marriage Law (# 26.618), the Gender Identity Law (# 26.743), and the Transvestite Trans Work Quota Law (# 27.636), violence and hate speeches persisted.

”We are still a minority in the face of power (because power is still heterosexual and masculine) but in the streets, we multiply and gain strength. We make the paquis' (heterosexual people) worst nightmare come true: we neither hide nor are we afraid,“ a demonstrator argued.

”The non-binary document, the trans labor quota, the IVE Law. Seeing yesterday's march, I am very happy to have helped them find their happiness,” said on Twitter President Alberto Fernández, whose son was one of the first to apply for the gender-neutral ID and change his legal name from Estanislao to Tani.