Spain is finally seeing sense on trans

The surprising news broke earlier this month that Spain’s ruling Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) plans to ban transwomen from female sporting competitions. At the party’s 41st congress in Seville, delegates approved a resolution to limit participation in women’s sports to ‘people with a female biological sex’.

The newly adopted clause reads: ‘Public offices and federations, associations and sports entities must guarantee fair and safe sporting competitions for women and girls, taking into account sex categories, avoiding competitive advantages which might be contrary to the principle of equality, and ensuring that no person of the male sex can participate in the categories meant for women.’

This glimpse of sanity represents a drastic change of tack for Spain’s governing party. It follows years of internal pressure from feminists against trans-activist lobbying inside the PSOE. As part of Contra el Borrado de las Mujeres (Against the Erasure of Women), an international, Spain-based feminist organisation that campaigns heavily on the importance of protecting women’s sports, I have had a front-row seat to this unfolding drama.

For almost a decade, the PSOE has been engaged in an acrimonious dispute between sex-based feminism and newer, flashier theories about ‘gender identity’. Trans ideology was heavily supported by the PSOE’s political ally and one-time coalition partner, the ultra-liberal Podemos. Trans-activist ‘feminists’, like former Podemos equality minister Irene Montero, rose to prominence and Spain soon led the way in promoting gender-identity ideology.

This was not without internal pushback, however. Back in 2020, the Federal Executive Commission of the PSOE released a statement titled ‘Arguments against theories which erase the reality of women’, highlighting the dangers of the gender-identity dogma that was taking over the party. It stated:

‘There is a growing polemic regarding the use and confusion, sometimes with a hidden agenda, of some fundamental feminist concepts, such as sex and gender. There are some theories (specifically queer theory) which are gaining ground around the academic and activist world, and which deny the existence of biological sex, given that they blur and obscure the material realities of women. If we deny the existence of sex, we deny the inequality which is measured and constructed on the basis of this biological fact.’

Despite this passionate call to arms, feminists within the PSOE initially lost that fight. The PSOE and Podemos coalition then went on to approve an extreme self-identification law in early 2023. The new ‘trans law’ made it easier than ever for Spaniards – including children as young as 12 – to legally change their sex. It led to a surge of men identifying their way into female prisons and women’s shelters. It also banned so-called trans conversion therapy, thus criminalising therapists and healthcare professionals who tried to dissuade their patients from medically transitioning.

However, since winning the General Election last November, prime minister Pedro Sánchez has taken a dramatic u-turn on trans. When reshuffling his cabinet, he purged Montero, the most virulent lobbyist for the trans law, from the government.

The PSOE’s recent internal resolution also included clauses to decouple the ‘Q+’ for ‘queer’ from mentions of ‘LGBTQ+’ in the party’s official documents. At the congress, former deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo argued that the PSOE ‘cannot be queer’. Queer theory, she says, promotes gender stereotypes, which ‘feminism has been fighting against… for centuries’. ‘We do not want to be imprisoned inside femininity or for men to be imprisoned inside masculinity’, she said.

This recent trans scepticism is welcome, but this is by no means the end of the story. The zealous gender-identity crusade that consumed PSOE for years has also been exported abroad. The government’s militant Ministry of Equality has promulgated these very ideas to Spanish-speaking countries in the Global South. While Spain may now seek to undo some of the damage caused by its dangerous trans law, places like the Dominican Republic, which Spain lobbied hard to introduce similar legislation, are yet to follow suit. Even if Spanish socialists have started to see reason when it comes to sex-based rights and gender-identity ideology, they have nonetheless created a mess for women’s rights and dumped it on poorer countries with fewer resources.

We should certainly congratulate our Spanish sisters on this remarkable victory, which is both well-earned and long overdue. But we still have a lot of work to do in fighting this ideology wreaking havoc on women’s lives.

Raquel Rosario Sanchez is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic.