Everything that goes up must come down. In 2007, during the Zapatero government, the mixed commission on Women's Rights concluded after months of study that prostitution should not be regularized as work, since it was sexual exploitation linked to human trafficking. The practice would not be persecuted or sought to be abolished – it must have seemed to the then Minister Rubalcaba that the Spaniards had already been restricted from smoking and drinking alcohol while driving enough to expect them to stop going whoring – but trafficking was, obviously, a crime classified in the Penal Code.
The question is whether it will continue to be so. Because the first idea that the Minister of Equality, Ana Redondo, has launched these days to define the draft law against trafficking that she recovers from the drawer of the previous mandate is that “it is not a punitive law.” According to what she says, she will care for the victim, protect her, reinsert her, give her papers regardless of whether she collaborates in the criminal investigation. But does it or is it not also intended to be a punitive law against traffickers and beneficiaries of trafficking? Or has the minister had a Freudian slip typical of a pro-prostitution feminist?
Politics sometimes seems like a bad Netflix series doomed to end badly. Although the Nordic ones – and some British productions – have unexpected twists. Like the one just given by the English National Health Service when it determined, after a decade of radical transactivism in the country, that children will no longer receive prescriptions for puberty blockers, not at least from the State. They will only be provided to young people who were participating in clinical research trials.
England has concluded that there is not enough long-term evidence of what happens to minors who are prescribed puberty blockers, something they have already seen in Sweden, Norway and Finland. This has required a public consultation, a provisional policy and an independent review of the English gender identity services for minors, a department that between 2021 and 2022 handled 5,000 cases and will now close. Let's see how many boys and girls will have to be hormoned in Spain, by law, before the alarm goes off.
