Andrea Muñiz Celestino
Andrea Muñiz Celestino (born 10 December 1969) is a Basque actress and LGBTQ activist. They are a pioneer in advocating for the rights of the LGBTQ people in the Basque Country in Spain. They were the founder president of Transexualidad-Euskadi, a non-governmental organization advocating for the rights of "transsexual," transgender, and intersex people.
Early life
Celestino became an apostate in 1989. After their identification as a transsexual woman, while they managed to be officially known by their female name in the medical history and health card, the gender could not be updated in the official records as per the rules at the time. They fought to be recognized as a transsexual woman by the Osakidetza, the public health agency of the Basque Country, which turned into a larger fight for the rights and visibility of such people with the public health agency. On 5 October 2007, the Civil Registry of Donostia gave them a birth certificate that recognized their gender identity, a first such instance in the city.
In the mid-1990s, Celestino filed the first ever public complaint in the Basque Country for physical assault on a transgender person. They got support from the Movimiento de Liberación [...]-les de Euskal-Herria ([...]-les Liberation Movement of the Basque-Herria), and claimed to have been the victim of these assaults for being a transgender person. The event caused a stir with several people retaliating against the attackers through the social media.
Activities in Spain
Since the late 1980s, Celestino actively participated in activities to improve the visibility of LGBTQ artistic works, and in the pride celebrations in the Basque Country in Spain. In 1987, Celestino was part of the unsubmission movement against compulsory military conscription in Spain. In 1999, they began getting involved in activism for the rights of the LGBTQ people. They worked secretly for three years, before they were one of the founders of Transexualidad-Euskadi, a non-governmental organization in 2002, of which they were the president of for 18 years.
The organization started popularizing the terms "transsexual woman" and "transsexual man", to represent the transsexual people and coined a new term, "transfeminist", to refer to people who fight for the rights of the transsexual and against normative binarization of gender. In addition, they advocated for a law of self-determination and against gender-based violence in the Basque Country.
In December 2005, the transgender people imprisoned in the prison of Villabona went on a hunger strike with the demand for recognizing their gender identity in prison. They reached out to Celestino for support, and went public with their situation with the help of transgender activist Carla Antonelli. As a result, in March 2006, a new circular was issued, which officially recognized the gender identity of those whose gender does not coincide with those assigned at birth in prisons.
From 2004 until the time of its approval in the Basque Legislature in 2008, Celestino collaborated with the socialist parliamentarian Coral Rodríguez Fouz for the creation of the Interdisciplinary Gender Unit as a part of Osakidetza. Celestino appeared in the parliament to talk about the needs of transgender people, and became the first transgender to appear in parliament. Later, the health committee of the Basque Parliament and its parliamentarians voted in favor of the Coral Rodríguez Fouz law.
In 2006, Celestino went an indefinite hunger strike along with Gina Serra and Kim Pérez demanding for a law that recognized gender identity. Later that year, Antonelli, the coordinator of the LGBT Group of the PSOE, announced the so-called "Gender Identity Law". Celestino contributed to the development and drafting of the law which came into effect on 1 March 2007. On 25 October 2016, the Basque Parliament drafted a pioneering law on gender self-determination and the rights of transgender people, after demands from Celestino and their organization.
Celestino went on another hunger strike in November 2009 that did not end until early December, until the Multidisciplinary Unit of the Hospital de las Cruces was launched. On 7 December 2009, the first gender reassignment surgery in a public hospital in the Basque Country took place.
On 8 March 2017, Celestino announced that they would no longer be actively participating in organized activism.
International activism
On 6 September 2009, Brenda, an Argentine transgender woman, was one of the people who provided evidence of corruption against then Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi. However, shortly afterwards, Brenda was found dead in their apartment, and the death was ruled an accident by suffocation from smoke or fire by the medical examiner. Activists ruled that death of Brenda was part of a wider persecution and discrimination by the Berlusconi Government.
Celestino demanded to the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, and the European Ombudsman, Nikiforos Diamandouros, to comply with Equal Treatment Directive 2006/54/EC and Equal Treatment in Goods and Services Directive 2004 of the European Parliament, and urged the European Parliament to suspend its political agreements with the Berlusconi government over his campaign of discrimination against transgender women.
On 18 August 2016, the body of Turkish transgender activist Hande Kader was found with signs of violence and [...]. Celestino sympathized with this tragic event on 21 August 2016, and organized a protest in the Town Hall square of Donostia on 24 August in memory of Hande.