Juan Carlos Florián, a former gay pornographic actor who refers to himself as “female,” resigned from his position as Equality Minister of Colombia on Wednesday amid an ongoing lawsuit that argues his designation broke the ministerial “gender parity” quotas demanded by Colombian law.
Florián, a longtime LGBTQIA2 activist, is described as a close ally of far-left President Gustavo Petro and another controversial figure of Petro’s administration. Petro appointed Florían as the nation’s Equality Minister in August. Florían reportedly claimed during a podcast at the time that he refers to himself as “female” because, according to him, he is a “person and a f*ggot” but “is not gay.”
Days later, Florían further claimed to be a person of “non-hegemonic” gender and asked to be formally addressed as “ministra,” the Spanish word for a female minister instead of “ministro,” the word used for a male minister.
“I come from the streets, from struggle, from real activism. I was a sex worker, I made adult content, I am HIV positive, and I was a migrant,” Florían wrote in a self-promotional Instagram video in August.
His resignation from the Equality Ministry occurs amid a lawsuit reportedly filed at the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca by Colombian law school student Juan Manuel López, who argued that Florían’s appointment as equality minister stood in violation Colombia’s “Gender Parity” law, a legislation passed in 2024 which states that there must be an equal 50/50 representation between men and women in high-ranking government positions. The lawsuit further argued that, including Florían, who is a man, there are ten male ministers in the government against nine female ministers, breaking the parity in favor of men.
On Monday, the court admitted the lawsuit and, as a precautionary measure, it ordered the suspension of Florían’s ministerial position. President Petro condemned the court order as “unnecessary” and “homophobic” in a social media rant on Monday. Petro also claimed that there is “parity” in his cabinet “whether Juan is a man or a woman, or both.”
“It is a homophobic measure. The debate is important, but it disregards the right to be a person and goes directly against human freedom. People are free, and we know that they must be able to develop freely. Otherwise, we will return to slavery, and slavery cannot be allowed again,” Petro wrote.
“If a person feels that they are a man or a woman, that person says so. That is their right, and no one, absolutely no one, can force them to do otherwise, not a judge, not the police, not a parent, not society, not the state,” he continued. “The prioritization of personal freedom is what makes us democratic socialists, true liberals, libertarians.”
According to Infobae, Florián’s defense argued that the lawsuit constitutes an act of discrimination by attempting to “pigeonhole Juan Carlos Florian Silva into gender binarism, which conflicts with his non-hegemonic identity construction,” and presented social messages written by Florían as arguments for his defense, one of which, reportedly dated February 2018, read, “My dear, one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman in the course of life. Stop the drama and don’t discriminate.”
Florían’s lawyers further argued that he should be excluded from “binary calculations” as “he does not identify as male,” and as such, the Colombian ministerial cabinet would consist of “nine women, nine men, and one gender-fluid person.”
Florían’s passage through the Equality Ministry, and the Ministry itself, have been the subject of several controversies for the Colombian government throughout the year.
The Ministry was created by Petro’s administration in June 2023. Vice President Francia Márquez was appointed to serve as its inaugural Minister until she resigned from the Ministry in February 2024 in the aftermath of Petro’s disastrous broadcast in which he called for the legalization of cocaine, said it is “not worse than whiskey,” mused about Greek eroticism, and claimed that cocaine could be “sold like wine” if it were legal. Although Márquez resigned from the Equality Ministry, she remained as vice president as it is an elected position.
Since then, Márquez, herself a radical leftist activist, has distanced herself from Petro’s leftist government and has publicly condemned and torched his administration in the months following the February controversy. In an August interview with RCN, Márquez said that Petro had originally ordered her to appoint Florián as vice minister for diversity, which she refused.
“I told the president that I did not want to expose myself to a higher level of violence by appointing Florián and that I was not going to appoint him. It was at that moment that I submitted my letter of resignation,” Márquez reportedly said in the interview.
In response, Petro accepted her resignation from the ministry and temporarily replaced her with Carlos Rosero, an “Afro-descendant” activist. Weeks before the interview, Petro, in one of his government broadcasts, issued a message reportedly addressed to Márquez, declaring, “no black person tells me that a porn actor should be excluded.”
Colombian outlets reported on Thursday morning that the Colombian presidency republished Florían’s resume on its website hours after his resignation. The newspaper El Tiempo said that the decision appears to be a “move” by Petro’s administration to reinstate Florían after it recently appointed Carina Murcia as new technology minister.
At press time, the website of the Colombian Equality Ministry lists Juan Carlos Florían as minister and his publicly available, yet redacted, resume fact sheet lists him as “male.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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