Panama, Peru and the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Cartagena implemented the controversial measure, which has been widely criticized by LGBTI groups and by feminist activists, who consider the norm discriminatory. The enemy may be common, but in the fight against the coronavirus each country has chosen its own strategy. In Latin America, there are states that have adopted strict rules such as mandatory quarantines or curfews, which carry fines and even prison terms if they are not complied with, while others have opted to urge the population to stay at home to avoid contagion.
Within the framework of compulsory confinement, there are places in the region, such as Panama, Peru and the Colombian cities of Bogotá and Cartagena, that resorted to an unusual and not without controversy measure: restricting exits according to gender. With this initiative, governments have wanted to reduce the number of people who are at the same time on the street to further contain the spread of the virus, but there are many critical voices that ask from which point of view it is effective to use gender to control mobility and label the measure as discriminatory.
The norm has been especially questioned by LGBTI groups considering that it creates additional risks for trans people, who already face structural exclusion in society. It was of little use that the decrees of the different countries prohibited acts of discrimination, since many trans women and men denounced ridicule, humiliation and police violence during the mandatory quarantine.
For Sonia Correa, one of the main feminist references in Brazil, the fact that governments choose sex / gender as a segregation criterion not only exposes the trans population to a higher level of discrimination and violence, but that logic also encourages Gender roles.
“With the measure there is a renaturation of sexual binarism. It is a natural difference that makes it easier for states to monitor, to coerce in some cases, because in theory it is easier to know who is a man and who is a woman than to look at a card. But the problem is that by resorting to this logic, non-binary people are excluded and the so-called natural order of sex / gender is reactivated, with all that it implies in terms of inequality, power and resources, among other aspects ”, says to the daily Correa, coordinator of the Observatory of Sexuality and Politics.
In this sense, Correa, author of the article “Going back to the usual: sex / gender segregation as a containment measure of the Covid-19”, makes an analogy with race and ensures that if the population were divided between whites and Blacks "would be a scandal and would be criticized as an expression of racism, and yet, when it is proposed to separate by sex / gender, it seems natural, and it is not."
Although restricting the movement of people according to gender can be an effective measure from the point of view of containing the transmission of the virus, it is a norm “extremely problematic from the political, social and cultural point of view”, adds the She is also a researcher at the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA), who proposes more objective regulations such as segregating by months of birth or attending to the last two numbers of the identity card. But how has the rule worked in the different parts of the region where it was enacted? Let's go case by case. Read more via la diaria