The government of Mexico City commemorated Pride Month this year by holding a mass wedding and gender marker change ceremony before the city’s Pride parade.
The event was the 44th celebration of LGBTQ people held by the city and was attended by an estimated one million people.
Under a banner reading “Hand in hand, we march with pride,” 120 couples were married last weekend. Another 131 people gathered in the city to legally alter the gender listed on their legal documents including national ID cards and birth certificates at a separate ceremony, per LGBTQ Nation.
Mexico City has embraced progressive views on marriage and gender identity over the last decade.
“In 2009, Mexico City became the first jurisdiction in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage,” reports Reuters. “It took until last year, however, for the rest of the country to follow suit with Tamaulipas becoming the final state to do so in October.”
Mexico’s foreign ministry issued the country’s first nonbinary passport on May 13 to Ociel Baena. The Mexican government will now allow individuals to opt to select “X” as their gender marker on passports.
“First non-binary passport from Mexico delivered today in Naucalpan, a great leap for the freedom and dignity of people,” tweeted Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.
Advocates say that, though the national culture is shifting to be more open to LGBTQ people, there is still more to be done.
“Being transgender is no longer considered a mental illness in Mexico, and transgender people can carry out an administrative process for legal gender recognition,” noted UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institue in a 2020 report. “However, cis-heteronormativity and the enforcement of a binary sex model continue to pathologize transgender people and expose them to stigma and violence. Public policy in Mexico is heterogeneous, in the sense that, despite rulings from the Nation’s Supreme Court of Justice mandating equal legal, social, and political recognition of gender and sexual minorities, many states and entities do not create local laws to this end.”
Genaro Lozano wrote for the Americas Quarterly in 2020 that progress on these issues should not be inhibited by the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, Lozano argued that “once the imperatives of the coronavirus pandemic have passed” the government needed to redouble efforts to improve access to HIV treatment, to shepherd nationwide same-sex marriage legislation, and to champion gender identity issues.
Mexico City suspended its Pride Parade during the pandemic, ultimately bringing the event back in 2022.
