New Catalan LGBTI+ Law: Countering Comfortable Lie of “We’re All the Same”

When equality becomes an excuse for abandonment

3 min read

Just now

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History does not always advance with noise. Sometimes it moves with a dry institutional click — cold, procedural, almost invisible.

On December 17, 2025, the Parliament of Catalonia approved a new law to guarantee LGBTI+ rights and eradicate LGBTI-phobia.

Not an amendment.
Not a cosmetic update.
A new law.

That distinction matters.

Because it openly acknowledges something uncomfortable: the previous legal framework was no longer sufficient. Not because it was ill-intentioned, but because reality moves faster than legislation — and because violence, discrimination and structural vulnerability do not disappear just because time passes. They mutate. They adapt. They persist.

This law did not appear out of thin air. It has been promoted since 2021 by the Observatory Against LGBTI-phobia, through sustained work, data collection, victim support and continuous political pressure. This is not a law born in an office. It is a law born in the field. In lived experience. In bodies.

And that is why it must be said clearly:

This law is necessary because formal equality does not protect against real inequality.

The fallacy of “we are all the same”

It always shows up.
Someone says it with a benevolent smile.
Someone drops it as if it were moral wisdom:

If we are all equal, they don’t need more rights.

It is a comfortable sentence.
And it is false.

Not because equality is not a value — it is — but because it confuses rights with conditions, and legal equality with material equality. Saying that no specific protections are needed because “everyone is equal” is like saying ramps are unnecessary because everyone has the right to enter a building. The right exists. Access does not.

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LGBTI+ people do not need “privileges”.
They need de facto protection, because de facto they face:

higher levels of violence
family rejection
economic precarity
increased risk of homelessness
systemic discrimination in basic services
institutional silence when reporting abuse

This is not ideology.
It is data.
It is case files.
It is bodies.

When the law enters the mud — and why that matters

One of the most significant strengths of this new law is that it abandons abstraction.

It addresses housing.
It addresses LGBTI+ homelessness.
It names lesbian invisibility.
It confronts the systematic exclusion of trans* and intersex people.
And it explicitly prohibits and sanctions conversion practices.

This is not symbolic. It draws a legal and moral red line. By sanctioning these practices, the law states clearly that they are not opinions — they are forms of violence.

Even more importantly, the law introduces a clear, harmonised and enforceable sanctioning regime. Because without consequences, rights are literature — and victims become footnotes.

The uncomfortable part — and therefore the essential one

This law also disturbs because it demands something deeply unpopular:

institutional accountability.

Good intentions are no longer enough.
Rainbow logos and commemorative days are no longer sufficient.
Now there must be application, sanctions, and reparation.

And this is where the real challenge begins: ensuring that the law does not remain trapped in official gazettes, but reaches social services, police forces, courts, schools, healthcare systems and housing policies.

Because a law that is not implemented is not neutral.
It always benefits those who already hold power.

Epilogue (or warning, depending on how you read it)

Defending this law is not “dividing society”. What divides society is pretending everyone starts from the same place.

Repeating “we are all equal” while some remain structurally more vulnerable is not equality — it is moral comfort. And moral comfort, in the politics of rights, always favours the strongest.

This law does not solve everything. No law does. But it places something on the table that cannot be taken back:

Real protection is not a privilege. It is a democratic obligation.

And now, as always, the task is not to applaud.
It is to watch.