Rome, Italy. 28 June 2022. On the occasion of the Global Pride Day, the CSIPM women and Gender Diversities Working Group delegation participating at the negotiations on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment negotiations at CFS held a public action to call for the recognition of all our diversities in these Voluntary Guidelines.
Paula Gioia, a small-holder farmer and part of the CSIPM’s Working Group on Women and Gender Diversities, in the representation of the delegation present in Rome, delivered the following statement:
Member States in the CFS can not deny the fact that millions of people that globally have been suffering discrimination due to their gender identities and/or sexual orientations, as expressed with great concern by the HRC/RES/17/19, 2011, which led to the later creation of the mandate of the IE SOGI 2016.
Strategies of governments, creeds or societies to avoid mentioning us is a clear assault against our existence. We exist, we are right holders, who often face multiple forms of discrimination based on different real or perceived characteristics of our bodies.
We are here raising our voices, showing our faces and bodies, demanding not to be bracketed, nor evicted from the current CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in the context of Food Security and Nutrition. Erasing us from this text would be an extension of the multiple acts of violence that we face or remain facing in our families, in our villages, in public institutions, in law systems, in Stonewalls, or elsewhere.
On this 28 June, the very same day in which we remember the victims of the violent police attacks against the gay community in New York 1969, which led to the resistance of our community and to our global pride for being who we are, we urge the CFS to move steps forward.
The gender and sexual diverse community around the world must not be subjected to abuse, exclusion, and marginalization from any area of life, health care, social protection, or education – neither for our gender identities and sexual orientations nor for any other intersectional characteristics we bring, being them real or perceived. Special attention must be taken to the Sex and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) that we face. And our right to food, housing, and a life in dignity must be protected.
The CSIPM stands in strong solidarity with the global gender and sexual diverse community and is bringing these voices loud and clear during the current negotiations in the CFS.
