Nothing has ever been able to stop Carla Antonelli. A fighter woman, excessive in everything, a torrent of energy that was already felt every Thursday in the plenary sessions of the Madrid Assembly, where she was the first and trans deputy in Spain since 2011 and 2021. That year, the bad socialist electoral result left her outside the Madrid regional parliament. Yayer, she announced her departure from the PSOE due to the delay in processing the Trans Law in the central government.
Carla Delgado Gómez, better known as Carla Antonelli (Güímar, Tenerife, 1959), did not have it easy from the beginning; perhaps for this reason, she got used to fighting very early. An actress who has been hanging for a long time and has always been an activist, already in 1977 she asked for the vote for the PSOE, at the gates of the first democratic elections in Spain, because she understood that this was the party that could best defend the transsexual collective, the struggle of all his life.
A complicated and slow struggle: despite her commitment, it was not until 1997, twenty years later, that she became part of the PSOE as Coordinator of the Transsexual area of the PSOE federal LGTB group. But even there, no one tamed her: in 2007, her colleagues saw how she even threatened a camera strike if she did not advance the Transsexual Law, which was finally approved in 2007.
“Not in my number”
Now it has also been the new trans legislation, or rather the delays in its processing, which has led him to announce his departure from the party: "Not in my number", he said in an incendiary and passionate statement , like everything he does, in which, genius and figure, he even says: "I exhort and invoke the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez" in the face of the difficulties and delays of this rule, to then remind him of "the word given and the commitment made”.
His powerful voice crying out in the Assembly -many times in the desert- in defense of LGTBI rights was a classic in each plenary session, Antonelli was always ready to fight, any battle that seemed fair to him. He knew that her presence, almost testimonial as a representative of an under-visible group, turned her into a symbol.
During her period as a parliamentarian from Madrid, she was able to work for laws such as the Comprehensive Transsexuality of the Community -finally approved in 2016- and the Law Against LGTBIphobia, of that same year. Two very advanced laws that went ahead during the presidency of Cristina Cifuentes, and that Vox has repeatedly asked to withdraw or at least modify.
Carla Antonelli did not lower her guard because life had taught her how it was to lose what she thought was consolidated: she suffered it herself two years ago, in 2021, in the Assembly, in a frontal clash with a Vox deputy who was He addressed her in the masculine: “A representative”, first, to, in the face of her protests, insist on calling her “the deputy”. She defended the right to “my own identity”, and insisted on clarifying: “I am a deputy”.
His combativeness, however, is not due to the 2021 elections, in which the PSOE of the Community of Madrid stood at number 35 on his list. A position that the facts showed had been very short: the PSOE only won 24 seats, so Carla Antonelli was left out of the Assembly. Now, her departure also takes her out of the party, although in her own farewell she reaffirmed: "I was, I am and I will be a socialist."
