Raised in rural Greece, queer artist and creator Sam Albatros remembers how his mom tried to consolation them in regards to the bullying at college.
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“My mother mentioned: ‘Don’t be concerned, if you develop up you are going to marry a girl, you are going to have youngsters and you are going to present them to her’… The worst factor is that she actually mentioned this to consolation me,” Albatros mentioned.
Final 12 months, Albatros (his stage identify) printed ‘Defective Boy’, a guide describing the challenges homosexual boys face in Greece, a largely conservative nation the place the influential Orthodox Church teaches that being homosexual is a sin.
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Premium“After all I felt stress to vary,” Albatros mentioned, utilizing a stage identify and sporting a shiny black face masks to make sure the guide is not tied to a sure identification.
A drag queen performs through the “Queer Archive Competition” in Athens, Greece. (REUTERS / Costas Baltas)
Greece this month banned so-called conversion therapies for minors, practices aimed toward suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identification and which well being consultants and the lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and trans group world wide have condemned. as psychologically dangerous and unethical.
Canada, New Zealand and France criminalized conversion remedy earlier this 12 months, becoming a member of a rising variety of nations in banning the follow.
Prime Minister Mitsokakis, searching for to interrupt with the standard picture of a conservative chief and going through elections in 2023, final 12 months appointed a committee to draft a nationwide technique to enhance LGBTQI+ rights.
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“I do know there’s a lot to be finished,” he mentioned on Could 17, the worldwide day in opposition to homophobia and transphobia. “Trendy Greece has the need, the maturity, the guts and soul to cowl misplaced floor.”
The federal government has additionally revoked a ban on blood donations by homosexual males and has been coaching public officers on LGBTQI points, mentioned Mitsotakis’s high financial adviser, Alexis Patelis.
The Greek LGBTQI+ group has welcomed the reforms of the final decade, together with the authorization of civil unions between same-sex in 2015 and the authorized recognition of gender identification in 2017. However many really feel they’ve been lukewarm.
‘DANGEROUS LAGOONS’
In follow, recognition of gender identification is a fancy judicial process and discrimination points arose through the pandemic. Identical-sex can not marry or undertake youngsters.
The ban on conversion remedy excludes adults and requires their consent, a transfer that LGBTQI+ advocates say is successfully legalizing what the United Nations has mentioned can quantity to “torture.” It additionally limits practitioners to paid well being professionals when they’re usually carried out by spiritual and different counselors.
“Sadly, in Greece, all of the reforms which were handed (by parliament) are half-hearted, incomplete, with very harmful gaps and loopholes,” mentioned Parvy Palmou, a non-binary and gender-queer psychotherapist on the Transgender Assist Affiliation of Greece. Greece.
The federal government additionally plans to ban pointless “intercourse normalization” surgical procedures on intersex infants who’re born with atypical chromosomes that have an effect on their our bodies in a means that doesn’t match the normative definitions of male or feminine.
“They’ve to have the ability to resolve for themselves at an acceptable age if and when to have an operation, figuring out the implications and the alternate options, and never irreparably injure their physique and soul,” mentioned Rinio Simeonidou, a mom of a intersex teenager and member of Intersex. Greece, a gaggle that helps some 250 households with intersex members.
She instructed Reuters that 13 years after her personal experiences, medical doctors had been nonetheless advising moms of intersex fetuses to terminate their pregnancies.
Polls carried out this 12 months by the Eteron and Dianeosis institutes confirmed that almost all of younger Greeks help key LGBTQI+ reforms. However the opposition stays.
This month, seven clergymen wrote to Mitsotakis protesting a pro-same-sex marriage TV advert: “Christians…know that God created two sexes, female and male. There is no such thing as a third intercourse”, they mentioned of their letter.
Making “Greece a greater place for everybody” is the federal government’s purpose, Patelis mentioned. However for Albatros, who lives in London and has received lots of of admirers for his artwork, returning dwelling shouldn’t be a plan for now.
“I nonetheless do not feel snug right here,” they mentioned. “I’m very unhealthy with having to combat for issues that I take into account ought to be a truth.”
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