Greece tries to make up lost ground on LGBTQ+ rights

By Renee Maltezou and Deborah Kyvrikosaios

ATHENS (Reuters) – Raised in rural Greece, queer artist and writer Sam Albatros recollects how their mom tried to console them in regards to the bullying in school.

“My mother mentioned: ‘Don’t fret, whenever you develop up you will marry a lady, you will have youngsters and you’ll present them’… The worst factor is that she mentioned this to really consolation me,” Albatros mentioned.

Final yr, Albatros (their inventive identify) revealed ‘Defective Boy’, a guide describing the challenges that gender queer kids face in Greece, a largely conservative nation the place the influential Orthodox Church teaches that being homosexual is a sin.

“In fact I felt the strain to alter,” mentioned Albatros, utilizing an inventive identify and sporting a shiny black face masks to make sure the guide just isn’t linked to a sure identification.

Greece this month banned so-called conversion remedy for minors, practices geared toward suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identification and which well being consultants and the lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and trans group worldwide have condemned as psychologically dangerous and unethical.

Canada, New Zealand and France criminalised conversion remedy earlier this yr, becoming a member of a rising variety of international locations to outlaw the practise.

Prime Minister Mitsokakis, who’s attempting to interrupt away from the normal picture of a conservative chief and faces elections in 2023, final yr appointed a committee to draft a nationwide technique for enhancing LGBTQI+ rights.

“I do know that a lot stays to be carried out,” he mentioned on Might 17, the worldwide day towards homophobia and transphobia. “Fashionable Greece has the need, the maturity, the center and the soul to cowl for the misplaced floor.”

The federal government has additionally repelled a ban on blood donations by homosexual males and has been coaching civil servants on LGBTQI points, mentioned Mitsotakis’s chief financial adviser Alexis Patelis.

The Greek LGBTQI+ group has welcomed the reforms over the previous decade, together with permitting civil partnership amongst same-sex {couples} in 2015 and the authorized recognition of gender identification in 2017. However many really feel they’ve been half-hearted.

‘DANGEROUS LOOPHOLES’

In follow, the gender identification recognition is a posh judicial process and discrimination points emerged throughout the pandemic. Similar-sex {couples} should not allowed to marry or undertake kids.

The ban on conversion remedy excludes adults, requiring their consent, a transfer which LGBTQI+ advocates say is successfully legalising what the United Nations has mentioned can quantity to “torture”. It additionally confines practitioners to paid well being professionals when they’re usually carried out by non secular and different counsellors.

“Sadly in Greece all the reforms which were accepted (by parliament), are half, incomplete, with very harmful gaps and loopholes,” mentioned Parvy Palmou a gender queer, non-binary psychotherapist with Greece’s Transgender Help Affiliation.

The federal government additionally plans to ban pointless “intercourse normalising” surgical procedures on intersex infants born with atypical chromosomes that have an effect on their our bodies in a means that doesn’t match with the normative definitions of male or feminine.

“They want to have the ability to resolve for themselves at an acceptable age if and when they’ll carry out any operation realizing the implications and options and never injure their physique and soul irreparably,” mentioned Rinio Simeonidou, mom of an intersex teenager and member of Intersex Greece, a bunch which helps about 250 households with intersex members.

She advised Reuters that 13 years on from her personal experiences, docs had been nonetheless advising moms of intersex foetuses to terminate their pregnancies.

Polls carried out this yr by the Eteron and Dianeosis institutes confirmed {that a} majority of younger Greeks help key LGBTQI+ reforms. However opposition stays.

This month, seven monks wrote to Mitsotakis protesting towards a TV commercial for same-sex marriage: “Christians … know that God created two sexes, man and girl. There isn’t a third intercourse,” they mentioned of their letter.

Making “Greece a greater place for everybody” is the federal government’s goal, Patelis mentioned. However for Albatros, who lives in London and has earned a whole bunch of admirers for his or her artwork, returning dwelling just isn’t a plan for now.

“I nonetheless don’t really feel snug right here,” they mentioned. “I am very unhealthy with having to combat for issues that I contemplate that they need to be a given.”

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Deborah Kyvrikosaios; Enhancing by Raissa Kasolowsky)