This week we published an election advice on our website for the upcoming Dutch national elections. This advice was based on our manifesto and compared 13 political parties on six topics:
- Reproductive and parental rights
- Wage gap and (re)evaluation of ‘women’s’ work
- Freedom of dress
- Sexual intimidation and violence
- Racism and discrimination
- Sex work
It was brought to our attention that LGBT+ persons felt left out, as LGBT+ rights were not visible in the infographic that we created. At this point, we are no longer able to change the infographic (it has been printed 5000 times and the image has been spread around the internet), which makes it harder to repair our oversight. We want to apologize for that. We want to stress that LGBT+ rights are an inherent part of our feminist agenda and we want to encourage everyone to vote for a party that is committed to fight for LGBT+ rights. Below you can find additional advice to make sure that your vote supports LGBT+ rights. In the last part of this post we summarize how LGBT+ rights were part of our manifesto.
Vote for LGBT+ Rights
On the 7th of March 8 parties signed the ‘Rainbow Ballot Box Agreement’ (Regenboog Stembusakkoord). This agreement consists of 8 promises to the LGBT+ community:
- Changing the first article of the constitution to include discrimination on basis of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.
- A law on ‘multiple parenting’ will be made (meaning that a child can have more than 2 legal parents).
- Discrimination will remain prohibited.
- A legal ban on discrimination of transgender individuals and people with an intersex condition will be created.
- Registration of sex by government will be abolished as much as possible.
- The school situation of LGBT+ will be improved.
- An ambitious LGBT+ emancipation program will be formed.
- The support for LGBT+ individuals abroad will be continued.
The following parties signed this agreement: VVD, PvdA, D66, GroenLinks, SP, Artikel1, 50PLUS, Partij voor de Dieren.
The following parties were invited to sign the agreement, but refused: PVV, Denk, CDA, SGP, ChristenUnie.
If you can read Dutch, the following websites can help you decide what party to vote on when it comes to LGBT+ rights:
Gayvote – this website provides extensive information on LGBT+ rights and the elections. For example: here you can read what parties have written about LGBT+ rights, and here you can see how parties have voted on LGBT+ issues.
Republiek Allochtonië – this website has written a blogpost on how political parties deal with discrimination. In the infographic in this post
LGBT+ Rights in our Manifesto
When we wrote the manifesto on which we based our advice, we absolutely had LGBT+ right in mind. To emphasize that, we want to provide a short summary of our manifesto with a focus on LGBT+ rights:
The first part – on reproductive and parental rights – was written in gender neutral terms. We wanted this part to not be hetero normative. So we did not use the word ‘woman’ in connection to ‘pregnancy’ or ‘breast milk’. We also did not want parental rights to only be for hetero couples, but for all parents.
In the second part, on the wage gap en ‘women’s’ work, we pointed out how LGBT+ individuals are under represented in top positions in organisations and government, and that we demand that this comes to a change.
In the fourth part, on sexual violence and intimidation, we included numbers on LGBT+ individuals, pointing out that they suffer from these forms of violence on a higher scale than cis straight women. This means that the LGBT+ community needs specific attention, policies and protection.
In the fifth part, we included a paragraph on LGBT+ discrimination, where we demanded protection of the LGBT+ community. We provided links with background articles and numbers on what forms of discrimination people from the LGBT+ community have to deal with.
In our election advice, we did take all these points into account, but they became invisible in our infographic.