Argentina, Features, Southern Cone
Milei’s First Year in Argentina Leads to Setbacks for the LGBTIQ+ Community
March 25, 2025 By Stanley Luna
Leer en españolOn a sweltering February afternoon in downtown Buenos Aires, the transvestite-trans collective leads a march alongside the human right’s organization the Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Behind them are migrants from all over the world along with members of both Argentinas’ Afro and native communities. As the crowd grows, thousands of people come representing all sorts of groups: the LGBTIQ+ collective, the drag community, oncology and HIV patients, retirees, employees of public institutions, and those belonging to political parties opposing the current Javier Milei administration.
The Milei government has cut antiretroviral treatments for people living with HIV by up to 76%.
“They impact our lives and this country feels no pain. But it still has some memory and a sense of conscience. That is what we use to wake them up, the awareness that our lives are worthy, that we are their daughters, their sons and their whores,” says trans activist Marlene Wayar, who marches with the transvestite-trans collective Las Históricas Argentinas. Wayar is on Avenida Mayo, a few blocks from the historic Plaza de Mayo. In minutes, the avenue has turned into a ballroom dance floor where marchers chant slogans like “Fuera, fuera Milei” (Get out Milei) or “Dame, dame, dame tu furia” (Give me, give me your fury). It looks like a celebration but, in reality, it’s a protest.
“They impact our lives and this country feels no pain. But it still has some memory and a sense of conscience. That is what we use to wake them up, the awareness that our lives are worthy, that we are their daughters, their sons and their whores.”
In response to xenophobic comments made by the Argentine president, this march marked the first time where a significant number of migrants participated in the protest.
This past January at the Davos Economic Forum, Milei delivered a speech in which he linked homosexuality with pedophilia, claimed that feminists were merely trying to seek privileges over men and made disparaging comments about migrants and the environmental movement. In response, The LGBTIQ+ community mobilized by holding two assemblies which they called the Federal Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist Pride March. They demanded that Milei respect the sexual diversity of Argentine citizens and preserve the rights the community had secured over the last decade. In the days prior to the march, Argentinians negatively impacted by the government’s fiscal adjustment policy also opted to join the protest.
Historically speaking, Argentina has been a pioneer in guaranteeing rights for LGBTIQ+ people and women on the world stage. In 2010, it was the first country in Latin America to approve same-sex marriage; in 2012, it was also the first in the region to have a Gender Identity Law which depathologized trans identities and provided legal tools to ensure this group would have equal access to basic rights. More recently in 2020, the country decriminalized abortion and a year later passed the Transvestite-Trans Labor Quota Law, which requires that 1% of state hires self-identify as trans.
The February 1st march also had the support of notable Argentine artists and cultural leaders like singers Lali Espósito and María Becerra, who have both been attacked by President Milei for their position in favor of sexual diversity and their public opposition to the government’s conservative agenda.
An attendee holds up a sign in support of trans people and queer women in Argentina.
Despite the progress, laws in favor of the LGBTIQ+ community and women are at risk of being systemically dismantled by the current administration. As the march was being organized, the National Government mounted a campaign to continue its attack against what the ultra-right is calling a “cultural battle” of the “woke agenda”: an ideological war between conservatism and progressive thinking. On January 25, the Minister of Justice, Mariano Cúneo Libarona, announced on his social network account X that he would send to Congress a draft bill called “Equality before the Law”, in order to eliminate the Transvestite-Trans Labor Quota Law and to eliminate the figure of feminicide from the Argentine Criminal Code. “Feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality that only seeks privileges, putting one half of the population against the other,” the deputy wrote on his social media page, adding “women are using it to line their pockets and undermine men”.
“Feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality that only seeks privileges, putting one half of the population against the other…women are using it to line their pockets and undermine men.”
A few days following the march, the Argentine Congress reformed the Gender Identity Law to prohibit minors under the age of 18 from accessing hormone therapy and preventing them from changing their gender in the state registry.
That same day, Gabriel Villalba, a 17-year-old trans teenager, was relieved that his endocrinologist had recently increased his dose of testosterone but also admitted to being worried about what would happen after his two-month prescription runs out. He has no idea what will happen with his treatment, considering he will not turn 18 until August.
Villalba suffers from anemia and had started the consultations and medical examinations to access the hormone treatment in February of last year. After receiving the clinical results, the endocrinologist authorized the hormone treatment in December 2024. But now, Villalba says, the doctor is afraid to continue treating him, since the recent reform limits the treatments that trans health specialists are allowed to administer. According to the adolescent, trans people even of legal age have told him that their doctors do not want to treat them since the reform passed.
“When I found out about everything, I started talking to my friends and I got angry. If they take away my testosterone, I know that my health problems will return again, I will lose all the changes I am already having and it will affect my mental health a lot,” recalls Villalba, who is part of the Secretariat of Families of Trans Children and Adolescents of the Argentine LGBT+ Federation. The federation has filed an injunction to suspend the reforms to the Identity Law and, in the Argentine capital, the Contentious Administrative Court has already ordered to pause the modifications to the law.
“If they take away my testosterone, I know that my health problems will return again, I will lose all the changes I am already having and it will affect my mental health a lot.”
A man marches in the LGBTIQ+ Federal Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist Pride March with a sign against Javier Milei, who has made statements connecting homosexuals to pedophiles.
The Gender Identity Law was passed after years of struggle by the transvestite-trans collective. Once Argentina achieved democracy in 1983, this group continued to be persecuted and criminalized for their gender identity and expression through the Codes of Misdemeanors and Contraventional Codes, which began to be repealed in 2007. Without this law, a 6-year-old by the name of Luana would not have become the first trans child to access gender reassignment health services in 2013; nor would trans people now have access to the health system or the right to education. Much less would the Transvestite-Trans Labor Quota Law have been passed in 2021.
However, in his anti-woke discourse, President Milei has continuously targeted the LGBTIQ+ community. At Davos, he cited a case of a U.S. couple sentenced in December to 100 years in prison for child abuse in order to assert that “in its strangest versions, gender ideology is plain and simple child abuse. They are pedophiles”. Following this speech, hate crimes against sexual minorities, specifically lesbian women, surged in Argentina: a neighbor set fire to the house of a lesbian couple in the Province of Buenos Aires, a passerby beat a lesbian couple as they walked hand in hand in the capital and, in the northwestern province of Salta, another man entered the house of a lesbian activist and stabbed her seven times.
These cases are in addition to the triple lesbicide that occurred on May 6 last year in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Barracas where a neighbor threw a bomb and attacked two lesbian couples sharing a room in a hotel. Unfortunately, only one of the victims survived. The attack was committed hours after, in a radio program, Milei’s friend and biographer, Nicolaś Márquez, said that homosexuality is an “unhealthy and self-destructive” behavior.
A protester displays the names of the three lesbian women murdered by a neighbor in a hate crime in May 2024.
In 2024, according to the Observatorio del Instituto contra la Discriminación de la Defensoría del Pueblo, there were 140 hate crimes in Argentina. Forty-eight percent of these cases consisted of murders, structural violence and suicides. The ages of the victims ranged between 30 and 39 years old, and the most affected by these attacks were trans people. The violence suffered by trans people, particularly trans women, means that, according to the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Trans People, their life expectancy in Latin America is less than 41 years.
In addition to members of the LGBTIQ+ community, straight Argentines also attended the march in support of queer rights. Celia Molina, an 85-year-old heterosexual woman, said she was surprised when she heard Milei’s speech in Davos commenting, “We have to stop this idiotic madness that harms us. I am worried about the more than 50% of the country that voted for Milei”.
After the President won the elections with 56% of the vote in 2023, he quickly dismissed at least 900 trans employees who had been hired by the State under the Transvestite-Trans Labor Quota Law. Soon after, he eliminated the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, which was responsible for public policies in favor of women and sexual diversity; and also dissolved the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism.
For Carlos Alvarez, a gay man of African descent, the closure of these institutions represents a disregard on the part of the government for the importance of promoting human rights for all people. With these decisions, he says, the National Government leaves entire populations unprotected. However, Alvarez believes that the February 1st march marked a change in the dynamics of social movements within Argentina by simultaneously confronting fascism and racism.
“Unfortunately, we have become victims of a neoliberal government that is destroying institutions, not only in terms of the State, but in all the struggles in which women, indigenous people, LGBTI, afro descendants and people with disabilities have advanced,” laments Alvarez.
Starting in front of Congress, the march ended in front of the of ‘La Casa Rosada’, (The Pink House), the official workplace of the Argentine President.
The “culture battle” across Latin America: Set backs for El Salvador
Argentina is not the only country in Latin America that is currently waging a battle against sexual diversity. The Bukele administration in El Salvador is also going on the attack.
After being elected president in 2019, Bukele dismantled the Secretariat of Social Inclusion which included offices that received complaints of gender discrimination in public institutions, provided training on gender issues to federal workers and organized job fairs for the LGBTIQ+ community. While the department was transferred to the Ministry of Culture, local social justice organizations have claimed that in the six years Bukele has been in office, policies put in place by the two previous administrations were no longer being implemented, including guidelines related to the health system.
In 2021, the Salvadoran ruling party obtained a majority in Congress and, during its first parliamentary sessions, the pro-Bukele bench vetoed a series of bills that it considered “obsolete”, such as the Gender Identity Law and the decriminalization of abortion.
“We entrust our children, who are what we value most, with an education system, in order to teach them useful things for their lives: biology, math, important things, for their learning. And then they come and want to put ideologies into [our children], they want to put things into them that are contrary to nature,” Bukele told Catalina Stubbe, the Hispanic director of Moms for Liberty, a U.S. organization that is against sex education along with discussions of LGBT individuals in schools. He made this speech at the 2023 Conservative Action Conference, where Donald Trump and Milei were also in attendance.
“We entrust our children, who are what we value most, with an education system in order to teach them useful things for their lives… And then they come and want to put ideologies into [our children], they want to put things into them that are contrary to nature.”
Shortly after the conference ended, both the Bukele and Milei governments prohibited state institutions from using the acronym LGBTIQ+. This censorship can be seen in Argentina as it relates to comprehensive sexual education in public institutions as well as in El Salvador, where a play created by drag artists discussing the violence they face has been pulled from the National Theater in San Salvador.
“In these almost six years of government… the advances that have been achieved over the previous decade in facilitating access to fundamental rights for the LGBTIQ+ community have been dismantled one by one. In addition, public institutions and government officials, including the president have emboldened hate speech against sexual minorities,” says Roberto Zapata, an activist with the social justice organization AMATE. The activist also emphasizes that trans women have been the most affected by Bukele’s conservative agenda.
AMATE has been documenting cases of trans adolescentes who have been discriminated against by educational institutions for expressing their gender identity. In addition, according to Zapata, the Ministry of Health has made it so medical intake forms omit all sexual orientations and gender identities outside the cisgender and heterosexual norm.
Under the Bukele administration, official data indicates that 85,000 Salvadorans have been detained in the country over the last three years but NGOs like Socorro Jurídico Humanitario estimate that thousands of these detentions are arbitrary. Zapata argues that this overhaul of the prison system in El Salvador has “permeated” social movements as activists now fear persecution and/or the dismantling of their organizations by the authorities.
The relationship between the Trump, Milei and Bukele administrations should not be ignored. With Milei in attendance at Trump’s inauguration and Bukele’s acceptance of using Salvadoran prisons to house U.S. deportees of different nationalities in accordance with Trump’s anti-migration policy, these presidents are not simply united by an “anti-woke agenda” but in their tactics rooted in repression and cruelty.
About Stanley Luna
Licenciado en Ciencias de la Comunicación. Salvadoreño radicado en Argentina. Periodista e investigador. Ejerce el periodismo desde hace 10 años y se especializa en géneros y diversidad sexual. Sus investigaciones periodísticas y académicas también abarcan el acceso a los derechos humanos de poblaciones vulnerables en América Latina. Colabora para el periódico Página 12, Agencia Presentes y Filtra Leaks (Argentina), Revista Alharaca (El Salvador) e Intertextual (Costa Rica). En 2020 fue premiado en la categoría de Excelencia Periodística por la Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa por un especial colaborativo sobre desapariciones forzadas en El Salvador, publicado en la revista Séptimo Sentido, de La Prensa Gráfica.
Ha sido becario del extinto periódico argentino Cosecha Roja, de la International Women’s Media Foundation y del Consorcio para Apoyar el Periodismo Independiente en la Región. Actualmente es editor independiente y estudiante de la carrera de Edición de Libros en la Universidad de Buenos Aires, en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, donde colabora como adscripto ad honorem.
Luna holds a degree in Communication Sciences. A Salvadoran journalist and researcher based in Argentina, he has been practicing journalism for 10 years and specializes in gender and sexual diversity. His journalistic and academic research also covers access to human rights for vulnerable populations in Latin America. He collaborates for the newspaper Página 12, Agencia Presentes and Filtra Leaks (Argentina), Revista Alharaca (El Salvador) and Intertextual (Costa Rica). In 2020 he was awarded in the category of Journalistic Excellence by the Inter American Press Association for a collaborative special on forced disappearances in El Salvador, published in the magazine Séptimo Sentido, of La Prensa Gráfica.
He has received scholarships from the now defunct Argentinean newspaper Cosecha Roja, the International Women's Media Foundation and the Consortium to Support Independent Journalism in the Region. He is currently a freelance editor and a student of Book Publishing at the University of Buenos Aires, School of Philosophy and Letters, where he collaborates as an ad honorem assistant.
