Who is Fausto Martinez, Mexico’s 1st person to receive ‘non-binary’ birth certificate?

Fausto Martinez has become Mexico’s first person to receive a birth certificate with a non-binary sex marker.

The Mexican state of Guanajuato issued the certificate to Martinez on February 11 after they won a lawsuit through Mexico’s constitutional appeals process, according to a report in People.com.

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“I have always said what is not named does not exist. For this reason, the transcendence of this fact, the Mexican state recognizes that non-binary people exist and with that we are subject to rights and obligations,” they wrote in a Twitter thread.

The certificate they received now lists ‘NB’ (non-binary) as a section of ‘sex’.

Martinez is a 26-year-old LGBTQ activist and law student. In the tweet thread, he detailed the entire process of reaching this milestone. 

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It started with the first time they approached the National Electoral Institute (INE) in September last year with the request to add ‘NB’ on their official documents. The request was denied. 

Martinez then reached out to the executive director of Amicus, a civil society organisation that works for the ‘defense and promotion’ of the sights of LGBTI people. The director, Pablo Delgado, helped them file the case in Leon in November, which they won in January, according to a report by the Associated Press. While the judgement is concerned only with Martínez’s case, Delgado said that the decision could be used as a precedent.

Martínez, 26, detailed the process, recounting that they first approached the National Electoral Institute (INE) in September with a group of people wishing to put “NB” on their official documents, instead of sex.

Also Read: Dana Zzyym: The first US citizen to get a nonbinary gender passport

After the INE denied the request, Martínez sought help from Juan Pablo Delgado, executive director of Amicus, described on their website as “a Mexican civil society organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of the rights of LGBTI people.”

“It is a collective achievement of non-binary people in Mexico, that our existence is legally recognized with all that that implies, making us a legal entity with rights and obligations,” Martínez told Mexican news agency EFE.

The achievement is huge in the backdrop of Mexico being the second country in Latin America to have the highest crime rate against LGBTQIA+ people, findings from the National Observatory of Hate Crimes LGBT by the Arco Iris Foundation revealed, reported The Recent Times.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s top court had ruled in 2019 that all transgender people should be issued an updated birth certificate after they completed their gender confirmation surgery, according to the People report.