COINCIDING with 'Pride month' and just before International Pride Day – on June 28 – a report has revealed Spain is one of the world's top countries for protecting and supporting the homosexual and bisexual community, as well as the transgender and intersex population.
A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – whose member countries cover the whole of the developed world and a few emerging nations – shows Spain is the fifth-best place in the world for non-heterosexual people to visit, live and work, and equally so for trans people.
Anecdotal evidence has shown, for the best part of 20 years at least, that expats who identified as homosexual or bisexual were pleasantly surprised by how 'ordinary' they felt when they moved to Spain, experiencing total acceptance, feeling safe, and being able to talk freely about their partners without avoiding personal pronouns, even with the older generations and in the workplace.
The popularly-used acronym, LGB (lesbian, gay and bisexual) was recently extended to include 'TI' (transgender and intersex), although the debate rages on as to whether they should be separated, as they have no connection between them other than both communities having once suffered from being ostracised or invisible; transgender people are just as likely to be heterosexual as non-trans or 'cisgender' people, and their support needs are very different from those of people who are comfortable with their biological sex but are romantically attracted to either the same sex, or both.
Given that the two have been joined, for the moment, as 'LGBTI', the OECD report does not differentiate between them when analysing which countries meet international equality and integration standards – even though it is likely many nations do better with one community than with another.
How the rest of the world performs
The report says Spain fulfils 69% of international criteria in place as at 2019, and is only beaten by Canada (87%), Portugal (76%), France (74%) and The Netherlands (72%).
And Spain is ahead of forward-thinking European nations such as Germany (68%) and Iceland (67%), the latter of which is on a par with Australia.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com