Laura Baptist |
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) will have made history: for the first time there will be a ballot for president of the autonomous community with a trans candidate at the helm, Emma Colao.
“It has cost us three times as much, but we have broken the silence,” this Law graduate, professionally linked to the third sector of social action on the islands, assures EFE.
Emma Colao (Agüimes, 1995) leads the Legal Department of a dependency entity and has been a legal advisor representing 180 social entities in the Canary Islands. In addition, she has specialized as a trainer for the National Police, Civil Guard and local police on hate crimes on the islands.
His program highlights the defense of public services to “eliminate and reduce their outsourcing and privatization, which is 87% in the Canary Islands, as well as the defense of the territory because it is necessary to “break with the model of urbanization and megaprojects for the sector economic tourism” offering alternatives in an “environment of social care economy”.
As a candidate for Reunir Canarias, she proposes “increasing the flow of active employment”, because “there are many professional categories that could be dedicated to this economic environment”. And she also remembers that her coalition defines itself as a force of “Canarian obedience.”
More than “as a trans candidate”, she presents herself as someone who has “a lot to say”. Canarias, she says, “she has always been a spearhead in LGTBI rights, precisely because the islands know what the concept of freedom means”, although “not everyone likes it”.
“These islands are always cited as one of the main flows of defense of the rights of the LGTBI community and putting ourselves out there, exposing ourselves as trans people for the first time in the political history of the Canary Islands and Spain is a must,” he reflects.
Colao does not forget that “every time a trans person participates in a space, they have had to fight “three times as much as the others to be there”, so the fact that there are trans candidates means “opening doors and leaving them open so that other people can participate, just as the rest of the people have always been able to freely decide on issues that not only affect the trans collective, but the entire population”.
“It is something necessary. We have been silent and we have broken it, we have taken a step forward so that they are not going to make decisions about our bodies and our lives again, because we also have the right to actively participate in a policy that interests everyone”, defends the candidate of Reuniting the Canary Islands.
Emma Colao stresses that trans people “are no longer going to go back to the closets” and are willing to participate “like the rest”, so she thinks that this happening for the first time in these candidacies throughout the territory is “the beginning of what is to come”.
all insufficient
She is a trans woman who does not take hormones and it has not been easy for her identity to be understood. “In this society we are all insufficient: not tall or short, not skinny enough, not fat, not rich enough, not poor enough,” she says.
“I am insufficiently a woman and insufficiently a man, but I am insufficiently sufficient to be part of this town, to decide for myself and I expect the same from my people,” adds Colao, who warns that “reducing a woman’s identity to its corporality, to its hormones, to its sexuality, is to reduce the concept of gender to nothing”.
Emma Colao lives in the first Spanish community that legislated on the freedom of trans people to define themselves as they wish, with the obligation of the administrations to respect that felt identity in all files or procedures, in a law that was supported by the entire Parliament of the Canary Islands (PSOE, CC, PP, Sí Podemos Canarias, NC, Cs and ASG).
“My identity is mine, it is self-perceived, defended by myself because there are many ways to be a woman,” defends this candidate, “not all women have the same corporeality, nor the same reality, nor do they face the same violence.”
Reunir Canarias has the support of several public figures such as the ERC deputy in Congress Gabriel Rufián or the mayor of Cádiz, José María González “Kichi”.
“We are very happy with this support for a project because it means that this project is not a political party, it is a meeting point between social movements,” Colao presumes.
Regarding the team that accompanies her on the list, she has highlighted the diversity of the profiles, with representatives of “the fight for the rights of the brother people of the Sahara” or of the Gran Canaria Biosphere Reserve who “fight for the defense of the territory”, or a partner “farmer and rancher, who knows exactly what it means to be a woman in this type of field”.
He also shares a list with colleagues who are on the front line of the “defense of the alternative culture of journalism and rap in the Canary Islands”, as well as the field of emergencies and emergencies who know “perfectly how health is found in the Canary Islands”. EFE