Europe’s first transgender minister said she will bail out of a trade mission to the United States next month over President Donald Trump’s policies targeting LGBTQ+ people.
Petra De Sutter, who was a Green MP and deputy prime minister of Belgium from 2020 until February this year, was slated to join a Belgian delegation heading to Los Angeles and San Francisco in October.
But De Sutter, who left national politics for academia and begins her term as rector of Ghent University next month, announced Thursday she would not go on the mission because of “the current rules President Trump has issued.”
“I simply can’t go there, or I’ll get into trouble,” De Sutter told Belgian news agency Belga. “Or I’ll cause some kind of incident, and I have no interest in that.”
Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders that target transgender people. His administration has sought to recognize only two, unchangeable sexes, male and female, remove “nonbinary” or “other” options from federal documents, including passports and visas, and ban transgender people from competing in sports.
De Sutter stressed by email to POLITICO that she was steering clear of the U.S. in a bid to avoid a “diplomatic” incident.
“I am a former deputy prime minister after all,” she said, declining to comment further.
De Sutter served as an MEP with the Greens/European Free Alliance from 2019 to 2020, before becoming Belgium’s deputy prime minister and minister of public administration and public enterprises in October 2020, making history as the continent’s first openly transgender national-level minister.
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