Bolivia has a new gender identity law that might put it in Latin America’s vanguard on LGBT rights — but the story behind the measure reveals how far the Andean nation still has to go before ending homophobia. That’s according to Carlos Parra, aka Paris Galán, the country’s best known drag queen and a prominent gay rights campaigner.
Signed into law in May, the measure allows people to change their gender on official identity documents. It means that Bolivia joins Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia as the only four nations in the deeply Catholic region to recognize the needs of transsexual and transgender citizens in this way. Unveiling the new law, Vice President Alvaro García Linera said it would put an end to the “social hypocrisy” in which many Bolivians had previously refused to acknowledge the existence of the LGBT community.