Valentina Verbal campaigned to make history as Chile’s first transgender congresswoman. Had she won, Chile’s LGBT community would have representation in the national Congress before most other countries around the world.
Verbal learned that she would have to run under her legal male name or pull out of the race. Verbal decided to step down.
From the Global Voices site."The transgender woman ran for office having applied for — but without having secured — a legal name change. Verbal – who was born a man, but said she always felt like a woman — prefers to keep her birth name a secret. She said that the name not only misidentifies her, but has tangled her identity since childhood. “I thought, perhaps naively, that given the vacuum of electoral laws, and filling in that space with the anti-discrimination law, there wouldn’t be trouble getting what I asked,” she said. Verbal explained that voters wouldn’t recognize her birth name on the ballot. The campaign would be a wash with her having been in politics for years as Valentina Verbal. She belongs to Chile’s center-right National Renewal Party (RN) and spent the past years fighting for an anti-discrimination law."
Hopefully in the future Valentina will get the name problem straightened out and push Chile ahead in TGLB reform. Follow the link above for more!
