On April 15, a Twitter user reported that she had been the victim of “an attack of transphobia” on the premises of a Cinemex in Mexico City. Specifically, the choreographer and her companion were expelled from the women's toilets and an employee would have called them “gentlemen”.
This Saturday, the company has already issued a statement about it, in the text published from its official Twitter account, the film network highlighted that it seeks to maintain a “family atmosphere” and offered an apology to “the community that was offended by the misunderstanding”.
“At Cinemex, our commitment is to offer a respectful service to all the people who visit us, since our priority and policy is to make them feel and experience The Magic of Cinema in any of our complexes.”
In this image, the company Cinemex also highlighted that they have “the obligation to take care of the integrity and family atmosphere” that they provide in each of their cinemas. Therefore, they “categorically reject any situation that may be offensive” within their spaces.
The communiqué also read the following paragraph in which the apology was included:
“That is why we offer an apology to the entire community that was offended by the misunderstanding that arose today in one of our resorts in Mexico City. Thus, we are committed to strengthening our policies of respect.”
It should be noted that the positioning of the company was criticized by various activists and influencers on Twitter, as they categorized it as “insufficient” and even “ambiguous”.
For his part, the journalist and TEDTalker Pável Gaona pointed out that the company's text would fall into re-victimization and to prove that there was no real aggression, but rather it was a confusion:
“'To the entire community WHO FELT OFFENDED... 'No Cinemex, those are not apologies (much less reparations for damage or clear guidelines or measures to avoid these ACTS OF DISCRIMINATION),” he wrote.
Many people belonging to or empathetic to the LGBT+ community criticized Cinemex's positioning, however, there were also netizens who “applauded” the company for its statement, since it supposedly does not “give in” to minority tolerance and would have maintained a rigid stance on the incident.
It is important to note that in the face of the incident, many Twitter users took as true a screenshot in which Cinemex had accused trans women of showing their genitals to women who were in the toilets, including minors.
This image could be fake and have been created with some photo editor or with the “inspect element” function of any browser, since the official Cinemex account does not have the supposed answer in the section for it.
The choreographer and dancer Coletti pointed out to the Cinemex company for “an attack of transphobia”, the incident occurred in the premises of the Reforma 222 shopping center, located in the Cuahtemoc mayor's office in Mexico City.
According to her tweets, an employee of the complex asked her and her companion to leave the women's toilets without any justification, and she would have denied her gender identity by calling them “gentlemen”.
“We just went through an attack of transphobia in @Cinemex of 222. They ran us out of the women's bathroom.” , wrote @ColettiLo, the woman who claimed to have been a victim of transphobia.
In her short thread, the influencer detailed that the person used as an argument the presence of minors to request their departure from the toilets: “A movie employee came in and called us' caballeros' and asked us to get out of the bathroom because there were people with her children.” , Coletti wrote.
Transphobia is defined as follows in accordance with the Glossary of Sexual Diversity, Gender and Sexual Characteristics provided by the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination (CONAPRED):
“Rejection, discrimination, invisibility, mockery, non-recognition of the person's gender identity and/or expression and other forms of violence based on prejudice, stereotypes and stigmas towards people with trans identities, expressions and experiences, or who are perceived as such.”
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