Zurich Pride: thousands march for transgender rights

This year’s event was run under the motto: “Trans – living diversity”. © Keystone / Michael Buholzer

Huge crowds turned out for the Pride Parade in Zurich on Saturday, which this year focussed on the rights and challenges of transgender people.

Organisers spoke of some 40,000 participants in the Swiss city, which would make it the biggest edition since the first Pride Parade 27 years ago. The march, held in temperatures in the 30s (Celsius), marks the high point of a week of events to celebrate and raise awareness about the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.

While last year the focus of the Pride Parade was the impending national vote on same-sex marriage rights (accepted in September 2021 by 64% of voters), this year the focus was specifically on transgender rights – also a first in the three-decade history of the event, organisers said.

These organisers – the event was backed by around 90 different groups – called on lesbian, gay, bisexual and intersex people to lend their support to transgender folk. While they welcomed a milestone legal change in January this year, allowing trans people to more easily change their name and gender in the Swiss civil register, challenges remain, they said.

“The road from accepting one’s own transgender identity, to coming out, to eventual steps towards transitioning, can be long as well as psychologically and physically difficult,” they wrote. They added that many trans people face rejection after revealing their identity to family, colleagues, and society; they are also often refused the form of address that they want.

On Saturday, according to the NZZ newspaper, speakers at the event in Zurich called for more discussion about gender identity in schools, as well as other measures like gender-neutral toilets and gender-neutral identity options in passports and ID documents.