Buenos Aires, Argentina — When Luana Salva got her first formal job after years of prostitution, she was elated.
A quota law in Argentina that promoted the inclusion of transgender people in the workforce (unprecedented in Latin America except in neighboring Uruguay) brought her out of the capital’s corners and into the Foreign Ministry last year.
However, just months after Salva received his first salary, right-wing President Javier Milei took office and began cutting public spending as part of his state reform to resolve Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades. Abruptly laid off in a wave of government layoffs, Salva said her world began to fall apart.
“The only option we have left is prostitution… and I don’t see myself standing on a corner, being cold, enduring violence,” said Salva, 43. “This government ignores everything that has been built to make us feel included.”
Salva’s sudden change of fortune reflects the political whiplash felt throughout Argentina. Previous left-leaning presidents who enacted some of the most socially liberal policies on the continent have given way to a self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” whose fierce assessments of social justice and efforts to dismantle diversity and equity programs have made him a leader global. extreme right icon.
“The only thing this radical feminist agenda has achieved is greater state intervention to hinder the economic process,” Milei said in a speech that received enthusiastic applause at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year.
Few in Argentina are more infuriated by Milei’s anti-woke agenda than LGBTQ+ activists, who worry that their government is rolling back their hard-won gains. Since she gained attention as a brash television personality, Milei has criticized the feminist and human rights movements as a “cult of a gender ideology.”
“Unfortunately, we are going backwards,” said Alba Rueda, a trans woman activist and diversity advisor in the former center-left government of President Alberto Fernández, who made Argentina the first country in the region to allow non-binary people to do so. “X”. gender on their national identity documents.
“What we have achieved is being discredited,” said Rueda.
After taking office in December, Milei wasted no time launching into Argentina’s culture wars. She closed the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, banned the government’s use of gender-inclusive language and closed the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism.
In an announcement timed for International Women’s Day on March 8, Milei renamed the Women’s Hall in the presidential palace the Hall of Heroes. To the delight of her conservative supporters (and the outrage of tens of thousands of women’s rights protesters outside her residence), she had the portraits of historical women leaders in the room removed and replaced with those depicting the founding fathers and Argentine soldiers.
Milei also scrapped a decree calling for gender equality in companies and civil society groups and ended gender-focused training programs. He has repeatedly criticized abortion or, as he calls it, “murder aggravated by family ties.” A legislator from his party presented legislation to Congress demanding the repeal of Argentina’s revolutionary legalization of abortion in 2020.
It is a far cry from previous years, when Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage and a few years later recognized the choice of one’s gender identity as a human right. In 2021, the Fernández administration passed its employment quota law, requiring the state to reserve 1% of all jobs for transgender, transsexual or non-binary people who would otherwise have difficulty finding formal work.
Before Milei became president, efforts to meet the quota were barely gaining traction, with 955 transgender people on the public payroll, far short of the 5,551 positions they were allocated under the law. The fate of the legislation is now unclear.
“The quota does not make much sense,” said presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni. “Each position will be filled by the best and most capable person, whether man, woman, transvestite or anyone else.”
Some 105 transgender people have lost their jobs in public administration in the last three months, according to the union representing state workers.
It’s a small drop in the bucket of 15,000 state workers who have been laid off as Milei races against the odds to bring the state budget to a surplus by the end of the year.
But transgender people who benefited from the law insist that each layoff has a ripple effect on Argentina’s sexual and gender minorities who remain vulnerable to hate crimes and face widespread discrimination in the labor market. In 2016, 70% of trans women reported earning a living from sex work. In 2022, after the law was passed, that figure fell to 56%, according to a study published last year by Buenos Aires government officials.
“The fee, for me, meant the possibility of changing my life,” Salva said.
Milei’s Libertarian administration says the layoffs are part of its austerity program and are not targeted at LGBTQ+ people. Milei also devalued the Argentine currency, cut subsidies, eliminated price controls, and closed other government ministries unrelated to gender and sexual identity.
But those in the LGBTQ+ community insist that the president’s populist shock doctrine disproportionately impacts them. In her very famous Davos speech, Milei harshly criticized “women’s ministries and international (feminist) organizations” for employing “bureaucrats who contribute nothing to society.”
“There is an approach here,” said Clarisa Gambera, a gender specialist at one of Argentina’s main unions. “Many of these affected people worked in gender offices of public departments that were dismantled.”
LGBTQ+ activists have fought back as many other political opponents of the government have: in the streets.
“We gained our rights thanks to the many warriors who gave their lives for this cause,” Ariel Heredia, a recently laid-off state worker who identifies as non-binary, said at a protest earlier this year in Buenos Aires. After being fired, Heredia, 36, lost the health insurance he needed to access HIV medications.
In his job search, Heredia says he will dress like a cisgender man, hiding an identity he struggled to accept for years.
“It’s a contradiction for me,” Heredia said. “But I have to adapt.”
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