The chamber has banned members of parliament from discriminating or stigmatizing groups, with the votes of the pro-sovereignty parties

The Parliament of Catalonia has approved the motion introduced by the Esquerra Republicana parliamentary group that recommends passage of a future Catalan transgender bill on the change of name and the recognition of the choice of sex of transgender people; a bill that must be based on international recommendations, such as those of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The chamber has urged the government to start work on the draft bill within twelve months. This is one of the ways to comply with the law on equal treatment and non-discrimination that was approved by the previous parliament.

The push for the transgender law was approved with the votes of Esquerra Republicana, centre-right Junts, and left-wing CUP and Comuns, while the branch of the Spanish socialists, the PSC, abstained. “The Socialists have abstained on the point of the transgender law because they have been blocking it in the Spanish Congress, from the Cabinet through to parliamentary debate; it’s not that they don’t want to talk about specific issues in the law, it’s that they won’t allow introduction of the law at all,” denounced the Member of the Catalan Parliament (MCP) Ms Jenn Díaz.

Elsewhere in the draft, it establishes that statute law be adapted in order to guarantee the rights of recovery and care of children of victims of gender violence without conditioning it to the consent of both parents. And Esquerra has also put to the vote the requirement of MCPs to have “a respectful, scrupulous, and exemplary attitude” in parliamentary debates in accordance with the principles of equality and non-discrimination, both on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation, belief, ethnicity or language, or any other type of discrimination, “including non-stigmatization and targeting of LGTBI groups and, very especially, transgender people.”

In MCP Díaz’s own words uttered in the previous plenary session, “we defend trans-inclusive feminism to curb the institutional violence that some, although an ever smaller minority, have stubbornly fed; we mean to fight those forms of hatred in this chamber that seek to victimize certain collectives.”