Shane’s victory, the first person to receive an X identity card in Chile

First modification: 10/27/2022 – 13:04

“What if there was another category where we didn’t have to be that way? Where, regardless of your genitalia, you can be rude or feminine or wear whatever clothes you deem appropriate?” asks Shane Cienfuegos.

What would happen, then, if wearing a skirt, high heels, lush hair falling down your back and red lipstick under a bushy beard and mustache did not imply social exclusion and being the target of multiple forms of violence?

Towards a rule of law

Shane is an activist for human rights and sexual dissidence. She is now the first person in Chile to obtain an identity card that instead of the letter F or M, has an X in the box that marks gender or sex. The document recognizes Shane as a non-binary trans person.

For Shane, it is “as a way of understanding society so that it is much freer and that we can advance to a rule of law, to a welfare state where regardless of how we see ourselves or how we feel, we can be part of something as beautiful as society. That’s where the non-binary issue goes. But it is not only a matter of conscience, but of action”.

“Advance Process”

An action of several years in Chile and important achievements, says Gonzalo Velásquez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (MOVILH): “Chile is culminating a process of progress for sexual diversity and the person with a diverse gender identity. We have achieved around 14 laws that favor sexual and gender diversity in Chile, and trans identities have made very significant progress.”

“First, the Gender Identity Law, which was recently passed, already recognizes trans people who have a diverse gender identity. But the particular case of Shane is a step further, because he is recognizing non-binary people, which is an identification that goes beyond what one understands as binarism, which is this patriarchal role assignment, let’s say… And it makes society debate”, he continues.

“Cruel System”

For activists for the rights of gender diversity, the legal advances in the issue of gender identity represent a change in mentality and public policies: “It was much easier to talk about marriage of same-sex couples, but it was much more difficult to make people understand that trans people exist and that they urgently needed their recognition. We always say that gay and lesbian people live in a paradise compared to trans people, who are in a process that gay and lesbian people experienced in the 90s”, says Velásquez.

Shane Cienfuegos thinks that these advances imply a challenge for the institutions of the Chilean State, spaces that have violated trans people and sexual dissidents: “I have survived. I have become tough to survive a cruel, dehumanizing system that only wants to leave us on the streets. And it is good that we are in all spaces, ”he emphasizes.