26/12/2022
Reuters reports that LGBTQIA and especially transgender activists celebrated outside the Spanish Parliament building after the broad left coalition group passed a law that would allow people to legally change their legal and formal gender without reference to a psychologist or medical intervention. The new law applies to anyone over the age of fourteen although parental consent and approval is still required for young persons of between fourteen and sixteen. Predictably, the right wing opposition parties criticised the bill, but in the end the broad left including Podemos, smaller socialist parties and the centre left official Socialist Party, all came together to approve the legal changes, by one hundred and eighty eight votes to one fifty against. The law will now move to the Spanish Senate. "What I think is going to change is society...It is about visibility and normalisation," Encarni Bonilla, mother of a transgender youth and member of the Chrysallis association, told Reuters.
