Mexican State Seizes Transgender Woman’s Daughter

We reprint below an article translated from Espartaco No. 30 (Winter 2008-09), newspaper of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League.

In 2006, the young Rosa Isela was taken from her home by the State Family Council (CEF) of the state of Jalisco, which is ruled by the neo-Cristero bourgeois PAN [Catholic clericalist National Action Party], and placed in a shelter run by nuns. Since then, her adoptive mother, Alondra Ávila, has been fighting to get her back. Why has the state ripped the child away from the person who has cared for her since 15 days after her birth? Because the CEF deems that the “conduct” of the transgender Alondra “does not fit within the elemental parameters of social coexistence for an underage person to have a moral reference point,” which is a declaration of pure fanatical intolerance. Full democratic rights for homosexuals and transgenders—for their right to adopt!

Numerous people have spoken up in defense of Alondra’s loving care of her daughter. Nine-year-old Rosa Isela has insisted that she wants to be with Alondra. A declaration before the DIF [National Agency for Family Development] of Tala, Jalisco, had established that custody of the child was given to Alondra. On 28 October 2008, the Seventh Family Court judge issued a ruling ordering the child to be turned over to Alondra immediately (apparently the first such ruling in Latin America), but the authorities did not inform Alondra and the CEF simply hid the girl! The neo-Cristeros who rule the country and the state of Jalisco could not care less about the well-being of children; it’s about pushing their reactionary Catholic values.

The working class should fight for full democratic rights for homosexuals and other sexual minorities—all those whom the bourgeoisie’s anti-sex religious moralism judges “deviant.” The rights of homosexuals will only be fully attained through a workers revolution; bigotry against gays flows from the deeply rooted sexual stereotypes decreed by the sexual division of labor in the family, the source of women’s oppression in bourgeois society, and is reinforced by the religious codes against “sin.” Capitalist society needs the family, which is a conservatizing force and the mechanism through which private property is passed down. The family is a key prop of capitalist class rule, which can only be fully rooted out through the overthrow of capitalism.