Marina Echebarría Sáenz
Marina Echebarría Sáenz (Donostia-San Sebastián)
Marina Echebarría Sáenz is a full professor of Commercial Law at the University of Valladolid and a well-known LGBTI activist, particularly regarding the rights of transgender people.
In 1995, she defended her PhD thesis, ‘El contrato de franquicia: delimitación y contenido de las relaciones internas’, at the University of Valladolid, where she now works and where she has been vice-dean and director of the Commercial Law Department. She currently teaches there and is part of the university’s Equality Unit. She also devotes time to research, mainly on commercial distribution, cryptocurrency payments, and business and computer networks. She has published several papers on smart contracts or blockchain, as well as on the difficulties in accessing digital marketplaces such as Amazon. As she has made clear, part of her academic career (and her life in general) took place under another name and another gender. This is a difficult and uncomfortable circumstance, although she recognizes that it is a more bearable obstacle than those currently facing the vast majority of trans people in today’s society.
In 2020, Marina Echebarría became the first trans woman to hold a university chair in Spain, after being accredited in 2016, as well as the first woman to obtain a chair in commercial law at the University of Valladolid. In her own words, ‘For a woman to get a university chair is already news.’ Unfortunately, she is right. According to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation report Científicas en Cifras 2021, in the 2018-2019 academic year, only 24.1% of university chairs in Spain were held by women, compared to an overwhelming 76% held by men. As of 1 January 2021, the UPF Department of Law had only 5 women professors, accounting for 25% of the total. According to data from UPF itself, this percentage drops to 22.8% for the university as a whole.
Marina Echebarría is thus not only a role model for trans people, but for all women in academia. But her career is not limited to this field. She is also an influential figure in the world of activism for the rights of LGBTI people. She says she began her activism when, some 25 years ago, a student asked her for help in initiating the procedure for a legal sex change. Since then, she has been vice-president of the Triángulo Foundation and currently chairs the Council for the Participation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex (LGBTI) People, which reports to the Spanish Ministry of Equality.
Her activism and legal expertise enabled her to participate in the drafting process of the current Act 3/2007, of 15 March, regulating the rectification of the registry record of a person’s sex, as well as in the drafting of various regional trans laws. Regarding the 2007 Act, which requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and for the affected party to have undergone medical treatment to modify one’s bodily appearance in order to qualify to have the record changed, Echebarría considers that, although innovative at the time, today it has become obsolete. In an interview with ctxt, she referred to the fact that the transition period has dragged on for years, noting, ‘I have spent several years of my life with an identity card with a name and picture that belied my reality. I can assure you that every time you have to sign a contract, use a credit card or do anything, you end up having to give explanations or facing suspicions and doubts that call attention to you. Living with documentation that does not match your identity is a daily obstacle for transgender people.’ As a result, she is a fierce defender of the depathologization of trans people and argues that their identity should not depend on the criteria of third parties: ‘We are not frivolously choosing our sex; we are expressing who we are.’
Echebarría has followed the development of the various regulatory proposals made in recent years closely and she is critical of the draft Trans and LGBTI Act that the government intends to take up shortly. In addition to gender self-determination, she believes there are many other urgent issues facing trans people too, such as access to good and uniform healthcare, access to employment, or the recognition of non-binary people. Future regulations should thus go further and guarantee that trans people can exercise all their rights on an equal footing with cis people.
Sources and other resources:
Interview at Cadena Ser, March 8, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXojFVml1Os
Interview Uva: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaBxxLK8kUs
Interview at Día de Valladolid: https://www.eldiadevalladolid.com/noticia/ZDE6C8715-CF56-BA71-37E8F595EE3A4AC3/Marina-Saenz-Se-nos-ha-declarado-una-guerra-cultural
Science in numbers: https://www.ciencia.gob.es/site-web/ca/Secc-Servicios/Igualdad/cientificas-en-cifras.html
Personal Twitter account of Marina Echebarría: https://twitter.com/marinasaentz?lang=ca