NPA LGBTIQ flyer for Pride (2016)

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NPA LGBTIQ flyer for Pride (2016)

This year, Pride will take place in unusual conditions: during a state of emergency, with pervasive repression and surveillance in the streets and the courts and on the internet. The anti-social Labour Act has been imposed by decree under article 49.3 of the constitution. Violent racist aggression, including institutional racist violence, is increasing exponentially. Sexism and the attacks that go with it is omnipresent, and goes unpunished.

Against this general backdrop, underpinned by austerity, LGBTI++ people are equally subject to the betrayals and inertia of the Socialist Party. The SP has betrayal the promises it made before the 2012 elections; its inertia concerns healthcare, education and the recognition of LGBTI-phobias. The medically assisted procreation that it promised [for lesbian mothers] has been downgraded to a potential commitment for the 2017 electoral campaign. The government’s pretence of promoting trans rights has been reduced in practice to MPs drawing up rules for a protracted, costly, restrictive, transphobic procedure, subjected to an arbitrary decision by a court, rather than being an expression of trans self-determination.

The marriage equality obtained in 2013 is a cut-rate marriage. People of certain nationalities are still denied the right to marry, and same-sex couples are still required to adopt their own children. Nor is marriage eliminating LGBTI-phobias. In addition, on the pretext of promoting ‘democratic debate’, the government insisted on many long months of discussion before passing the bill, thus rolling out a red carpet for violence by the homo-/lesbo-/bi-/transphobic and sexist fringe.

Less than a year before the end of its five-year term in office, the SP is already preparing its 2017 presidential campaign. It hopes to win thanks to LGBTI++ support and a positive balance sheet of its record on LGBTI++ issues. We refuse to let our struggles be instrumentalized in the SP’s interest, and especially to let our struggles be instrumentalized in the interest of promoting racism. We denounce all homo-/lesbo-/bi-/transphobic violence, whatever its source, and at the same time refuse to let our denunciation be used as a pretext for stigmatizing immigrants. The government’s policies of deporting undocumented people (even those who are sick or have been persecuted in their country of origin), of exposing LGBTI++ people and sex workers to danger, of institutionalizing Islamophobia, of smashing the right to work, of spreading social insecurity and of generalized repression have proved that the only interests it serves are those of the bosses and the patriarchy, not those of the oppressed.

We will not give up the fight. We are troubled and appalled by every racist or sexist attack, every instance of police violence, every deportation, every layoff, every HIV, viral hepatitis or STI infection, and every time that someone is denied care. We know that every one of these forms of violence is an expression of the same racist, patriarchal, sexist, homo-/lesbo-/bi-/transphobic, HIV-phobic, police and capitalist system.

We have observed the failures of a passive, wait-and-see attitude that relies on the institutions, the failures of back-room negotiations by big apparatuses that are supposed to represent the whole of the LGBTI++ community. We reaffirm our determination to take our battle to the streets in order to win new rights.

Everywhere, alternative, militant initiatives are springing up. We as LGBTI++ people have decided to take back our demands and our struggles. It is past time to rebuild a combative, inclusive LGBTI++ movement, in solidarity with other minorities, groups and individuals who are part of our social camp. This is the force that we are assembling, and we mean to make this regroupment visible by organizing a contingent at 2016 Pride.

The march is not the property of Parisians, or of the organizers, or of those who march in front, any more than anyone else’s. It belongs equally to every component of the LGBTI++ community.

Our list of demands does not claim to be exhaustive. Every group and every person can add their own, in keeping with their struggles and the tools they use to resist oppression and survive.

We demand: extending the right to medically assisted procreation to all women and all trans people; the recognition of legal parenthood (filiation) by means of a simple statement before an official of the registrar, without reference to marriage; the right to freely change one’s legal gender, without any costs, by means of a simple statement by the person concerned before an official of the registrar at a city or borough hall, without any requirement of proving a medical condition or of approval by a judge; resources for public health policies, in particular for the prevention of STIs, the promotion of sexual health, the improvement of care for seropositive people, and policies to combat LGBTI-phobias; respect of the right of asylum and legal documents for migrants who are sick or have been persecuted.