An Alberta MLA on battling gender identity

A reminder of the value of having diversity among Parliamentarians:

The Alberta legislature has lately become a place for remarkable confessionals, courtesy of the governing New Democrats. Last month, it was a member from Lethbridge who told of the brutal abuse her ex-husband inflicted on her, to bring clarity to a debate on reforms making it easier for Albertans to escape domestic violence.

On Tuesday, an Edmonton-area New Democrat personalized transgender issues, as the legislature debated—and would unanimously support—explicitly adding gender identity and expression to the Alberta Human Rights Act. Estefania Cortes-Vargas, a former office aide to Premier Rachel Notley, had previously been public about being one of the first openly gay MLAs in Alberta history. Tuesday, Cortes-Vargas opened up about gender identity, and started with frustration that assembly Hansard traditionally records members with gender-specific honorifics like Mr. or Ms.

From the Hansard, here is the member recorded simply as Cortes-Vargas:

As I wrote my notes, Speaker, I started off by asking myself why I need to include in that your gender in order to identify you. I asked myself this question before I even came into this Legislature and was asked to identify my gender so Hansard could put that into the transcription.

I have always battled with gender identity, gender expression, and I continue to do so. A lot of the time I don’t have the answers to who I am, why I act this way, why I dress this way, but I do know this: I do know that I’m a person, that I deserve rights, and that anything less than that is unacceptable. Gender, Speaker, plays a role in everyone’s life, but for the trans community and for the gender-variant community it’s magnified to a level that creates high suicide rates, high unemployment rates, high levels of work in the sex trade because people are shunned.

People feel like they cannot be themselves without continuously having to explain to people that, hey, maybe I’m a boy and maybe I’m a girl. It shouldn’t matter. If the way I look confuses people, I love it. I will always continue to challenge that the way I look needs to define anything about me, because at the end of the day, when I look in the mirror, I say: “For the first time in my life, when I cut my hair, when I chose different wardrobes, when I challenged my cultural identity as a Hispanic woman, hey, maybe I don’t need to wear heels, and maybe I don’t need to have long hair just because that’s what is expected and that’s what’s considered beautiful. I think I’m a beautiful person.”

Source: An Alberta MLA on battling gender identity – Macleans.ca