Venezuela has become the first country in South America to elect a transgendered person to public office.
Transgender woman Tamara Adrian has secured a seat as a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly.
“Yesterday, Venezuela demolished its own Berlin Wall,” Adrian told US magazine Out. Her candidacy already represented a milestone in Venezuelan politics, but with her triumph she becomes the first transgender congresswoman of the nation and in South America.
“Venezuela is going through the worst economic, social and cultural crisis ever recorded,” Adrian says, explaining that her agenda includes giving visibility to the problems that the Venezuelan GLBT community systematically faces. “
We have to talk about the rights of couples and families, about the gender identity Act, about the mutilation of intersex children, and about discrimination, which includes hate crimes, bullying, workplace harassment, and access to housing and healthcare.”
The election saw the late Hugo Chavez’s socialist party lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in 17 years.
