CARLA ANTONELLI
Power play
Carla Antonelli, Spain’s first out trans woman Senator, is a nightmare for the extreme right. But this fiery advocate — addressed as ‘Your Excellency’ — is going nowhere…
Words Vincent Jaskowski-Prowse
‘WE WILL NOT be lambs led to the slaughter.” These are the words that echo around the gilded walls of the opulent Spanish Senate on a fine April morning. It is within this setting, beneath ornate ceilings and surrounded by historical tapestries, that Attitude speaks to the formidable Spanish Senator Carla Antonelli, as her advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community is celebrated with an award at the PEUGEOT Attitude PRIDE Awards Europe, supported by British Airways.
However, just as she is denouncing the “wave of hate” being generated by trans-exclusionary radical feminists, the room, and later we learn nearly the whole of Spain, is plunged into darkness in a power outage that would last nearly 24 hours. (The cause is unknown, but the Attitude team considers it plausible that Antonelli’s fury may have brought down electric grids across the entire Iberian Peninsula.)