PETRA DE SUTTER: AN EXAMPLE FOR THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY

The efforts of President Obama in integrating the transgender minority in the U.S. society by opening several paths of the public career to transgender were completely useless. President Donald Trump has always liked to walk off of the beaten track (kindly speaking) by overruling important open-minded reforms started by decades coming from his predecessor. It was just 2019 when President of the U.S Donald Trump decided to forbid the access in the U.S. army for transgender people. Although Mr Deere said that “President Trump has never considered L.G.B.T. Americans second-class citizens and has opposed discrimination of any kind against them” and White House officials reject any implication that the policies are motivated by intolerance, it is clear the ambition of the conservative president to exclude an entire social minority from the U.S. Army. The Defense Department has established restrictions on transgender troops that largely prohibit them from transitioning while in uniform. Transgender people who came out before the policy, which went into effect in April, may continue to serve, but that will depend on how four lawsuits play out. President Trump is surely surprised that on the other side of the world in the so-called “Old continent” (which is very ironic actually) a transgender woman was announced as one of the country's Deputy Prime Ministers in Belgium. Her name is Petra De Sutter, professor of gynecology, specializing in fertility, at the University of Ghent, candidate of the Flemish Green Party. She is a vocal advocate for trans rights and reproductive rights. She had the chance to create a full-formed government coalition in Belgium after years of political gaps in that country and she has been a member of the European Parliament since July 2019. Petra De Sutter life story could be defined as emblematic for all the transgender community members in order to encourage them not to give up their purpose and ambitions in life but rather continue fighting against a patriarchal and dead-eyed society where minorities are always sacrificed in order to achieve reforms which are considered “desirable” for the conservative parties. “Not everybody has had the luck in life that I had, in being accepted in my working environment, being accepted by my partner and love. In fact, very few people in my situation had this luck. This is why I need to do something, for those who lacked this luck. I have a very strong feel of justice and find it so unjust that people in the world suffer simply because of who they want to be”, she said during an interview. It is unbelievable that we are living in a world where countries such as the U.S., which has been considered the most open-minded and cosmopolitan since ever, are literally erasing decades (but I would not hesitate to say centuries) of social reforms aimed at making citizens mentalities wider, conveying their efforts in order to build a society closed to the minorities. Petra De Sutter history is a glimmer of light in this context, reveling that the “Old continent” is actually the only one considering minorities and allowing them to achieve even the most important investitures in the political career, only judging people on the basis of their skills and competences, on the basis of how they are able to give a unique and positive contribution to the country and to Europe itself, thus making us aware of the importance of making the “equal treatment” and “anti-racist” laws FACTS and not only the vaunted claims crystallized in our democratic constitutions.