Tamara Adrián

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Tamara Adrián (born February 20, 1954, in Caracas) is a Venezuelan lawyer and politician. She was elected to the National Assembly in the 2015 parliamentary elections and began serving in 2016. She is the first openly transgender person elected to public office in Venezuela and the second openly transgender member of a national legislature in the Western Hemisphere. In 2023, she became the first openly transgender candidate in a Venezuelan presidential election.

Adrián is a member of the Popular Will party, which opposes Nicolás Maduro’s government. She helped found Pro-Inclusion, a group promoting equal rights. She studied at Andrés Bello Catholic University (graduating in 1976) and earned a law doctorate with high honors from Paris II Panthéon-Assas in 1982, plus a diploma in comparative law from the Paris Institute of Comparative Law in 1982. In 2016, she completed a senior government program at Harvard’s Kennedy School as a David Bohnett LGBTQ Victory Institute Leadership Fellow.

Before entering politics, Adrián worked as a lawyer and LGBT activist, serving on the board of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association and helping organize the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. She had to register her candidacy under her birth name because Venezuelan law did not allow changing a name after gender reassignment. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in Thailand in 2002, and in 2004 she asked the Supreme Court to recognize her gender legally, a request that had not been granted by 2016.

Adrián believes stigma and discrimination against transgender people contribute to poverty, marginalization, and violence, and she says these problems violate international human rights. She was inspired to enter politics after protests in 2014 and the government’s crackdown on demonstrators. She has appeared in films about transgender rights, including the 2011 documentary Yo, indocumentada and the 2016 film Tamara, in which she makes a cameo as a university rector.