LEGISLACIÓN SOBRE LA DISCRIMINACIÓN POR ORIENTACIÓN SEXUAL Y SU RELACIÓN CON LA SOCIEDAD CIVIL EN LA PROVINCIA DE ICA, 2018

Abstract

According to Corsini's Encyclopedia of Psychology, "sexual orientation" refers to "the erotic, loving and affectionate couples that a person prefers." "Gender identity" refers to "a person's deeply felt sense of belonging to a gender and the sense of conformity or non-conformity between their gender and their biological sex" (Saiz 2004, 68). Furthermore, there is no clear relationship between a person's gender identity or sexual orientation and their biological sex, since "the internal conviction of a person's sexual identity may or may not reflect external physical appearance, the gender role that it imposes the society or the role that one develops and prefers "(Weiner and Craighead 2010, 1578).

Consequently, SOGI-related rights are understood as human rights relating to a person's intimate partners and how a person understands and expresses their gender, rights refer to a person's ability to (subject to the consent requirement) express oneself sexually and emotionally and to form relationships regardless of sexual orientation and gender.

These are not separate rights, but refer to the application of human rights to various sexual minorities. An example is the right to be free from discrimination because of sexual orientation, or because a person's gender identity differs from that of their biological sex. But this category also includes positive rights, such as the right to marry and start a family, or the right to change the sex that appears on one's identification documents after surgery sex reassignment. Although heterosexuality should be understood as a sexual orientation in the same way that homosexuality or bisexuality are, human rights violations are more often directed towards sexual minorities than towards the heterosexual majority.

Just to give a few examples, homosexuality is prohibited in 76 states and punishable by death in seven of them3. Only eight countries recognize same-sex marriage at the national level4 (ILGA 2012; Human Rights Watch 2012). Therefore, in the field of human rights, SOGI rights are often framed as ‘LGBT rights’. LGBT is short for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transgender

Although relatively new as a human rights issue, several UN treaty bodies have endorsed SOGI rights as part of the Universal Human Rights Regime (Lau 2004, 1699; Saiz 2004). The Human Rights Council adopted its first resolution on the rights of SOGI in June 2011. On March 7, 2012, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, addressed the Human Rights Council, stating that the Discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is against international law. (UN Webcast 2012). However, although these examples, as well as the evolution of jurisprudence, point towards a greater acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity as part of the international human rights regime, these rights continue to be disputed. And although the treaty agencies and various independent experts from the United Nations have committed themselves to the issue of sexual orientation, UN political bodies, such as the HRC, have been slow to move up (Saiz 2004). These bodies are state-governed, and some states argue that the divergent orientations and gender identities of heteronormative female-male binaries are at best contrary to their culture or even pathological and dangerous.