{"id":15692,"date":"2020-10-05T12:50:53","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T12:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/?p=15692"},"modified":"2020-10-15T09:07:46","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T09:07:46","slug":"belgium-trans-politician-appointed-deputy-prime-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/belgium-trans-politician-appointed-deputy-prime-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"Belgium: Trans* politician appointed Deputy Prime Minister"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has taken 493 days for Belgium&#8217;s government to stand. The Vivaldi coalition, named after Antonio Vivaldi&#8217;s &#8220;The Four Seasons&#8221;, is made up of seven parties: the Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens from both parts of the country (Wallonia and Flanders) and the Flemish Christian Democrats. The four colours of the coalition parties &#8211; blue (Liberals), green (Greens), red (Socialists) and orange (Christian Democrats) &#8211; each symbolise a season.<\/p>\n<p>Alexander De Croo, previously Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Development Aid, has been head of the Belgian government since 1 October. Ms De Croo appointed Petra De Sutter, a Green politician, as Deputy Prime Minister and Head of the Ministry of Civil Service and Public Works.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"video-wrap\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I am proud that in \ud83c\udde7\ud83c\uddea and in most of \ud83c\uddea\ud83c\uddfa your gender identity does not define you as a person and is a non-issue. I hope that my appointment as Minister and deputy PM can trigger the debate in countries where this is not yet the case. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/fighttransphobia?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#fighttransphobia<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/WdgHu2gyy6\">pic.twitter.com\/WdgHu2gyy6<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Petra De Sutter (@pdsutter) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pdsutter\/status\/1312651622456197121?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 4, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Professor, activist and politician<\/h2>\n<p>The 57-year-old professor of gynaecology and head of the department of reproductive medicine at the Belgian University Hospital of Ghent was a member of the Belgian Senate from 2014 to 2019 and a member of the European Parliament for the Greens\/EFA Group from 2019 to 2020. De Sutter was the first open transgender Member of the Belgian Senate in 2014 and the first Belgian trans*woman on a parliamentary list of a political party in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament.<\/p>\n<p>De Sutter has always stressed that transgender is only one part of her. As a candidate for the 2019 European elections, she said in an interview<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want to be reduced to my transgender past, it is [only] part of my identity. I have many others. I want people to talk about me because of my work, because of my political actions&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>For 30 years De Sutter has been working for the rights of girls and women. She is regarded as a defender of sexual and reproductive health, who also deals with the ethical, social and political aspects of reproductive medicine and genetics, but also surrogate motherhood. De Sutter&#8217;s policy issues are a healthy environment, safe and sustainable products and a more social Europe. She is also committed to the protection of refugees and LGBTI persons. In Belgium, for example, De Sutter was involved in the reform of the law on transsexuals.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"video-wrap\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Petra De Sutter\" width=\"960\" height=\"540\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vPlq-oaBUBE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>She said that politics is &#8220;a lever for decision-making&#8221;, which is why it is so important that decisions and policies are based on facts and not on fake news or alternative information. Her concern as a scientist and politician is to &#8220;include science in political decision-making&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Although De Sutter wants people to focus more on her work as a politician than on her transidentity, her appointment is a strong and important signal in the face of the widespread tendency in parts of Europe to deny members of the LGBTIQ* community their place in society and to make inter- and transgender identity invisible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has taken 493 days for Belgium&#8217;s government to stand. The Vivaldi coalition, named after Antonio Vivaldi&#8217;s &#8220;The Four Seasons&#8221;, is made up of seven parties: the Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens from both parts of the country (Wallonia and Flanders) and the Flemish Christian Democrats. The four colours of the coalition parties &#8211; blue (Liberals), green (Greens), red (Socialists) and orange (Christian Democrats) &#8211; each symbolise a season. <a href=\"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/belgium-trans-politician-appointed-deputy-prime-minister\/\"><\/p>\n<p><i class=\"showAllLink\">more&#8230;<\/i><\/p>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":15695,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":""},"categories":[24,6,1,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15692"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15692"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15874,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15692\/revisions\/15874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartacus.gayguide.travel\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}