On Albanian TV, a Slur — and the Quiet Fight to Be Called 'Parent'

A debate on Albanian national television this Pride season was supposed to be about a single word. Should the law say “parent” — prind — instead of “mother” and “father,” so that families like the ones already raising children in Tirana could finally exist on paper? Instead, the conversation turned into something uglier, and more revealing. Journalist Blerta Tafani used homophobic slurs on air during an exchange with Xheni Karaj, one of Albania’s most visible LGBTQ+ activists, and the clip did what these clips always do: it traveled.

We live in Tirana for a good part of the year, and we have learned to read moments like this carefully. It would be easy to file the outburst under “Balkan backlash” and move on. But that misses what actually happened. The slur was not the story. The slur was a reaction to the story — and the story is that same-sex families in Albania are no longer a hypothetical the country can avoid talking about.

What the fight is actually about

Albania does not recognize same-sex marriage or civil unions in any form. That part is unchanged. What has changed is that the gap between the law and people’s lives has gotten impossible to ignore.

Take a family that activists and Albanian outlets have written about repeatedly: two women, together for years, raising two daughters. The children are real. The household is real. But because the state recognizes only a “mother” and a “father” as legal parents, the second parent has no legal standing, and the daughters can end up in a documentary limbo — unregistered, or registered to only one of the two adults who actually raise them. Change one word in the relevant statutes, from the gendered “mother/father” to the neutral “parent,” and a whole category of children stops being invisible.

That is why a single vocabulary change provokes a televised meltdown. Opponents understand exactly what it would do. So do supporters.

Xheni Karaj and the long road to Strasbourg

Karaj, who leads Aleanca LGBT (the Alliance against LGBT discrimination), has spent years building toward this through the courts rather than the headlines. The strategy is patient and deliberate: a same-sex couple pursues legal recognition through every stage of the Albanian judicial system, exhausts the domestic options, and then takes the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Karaj has spoken openly about pursuing exactly this path, including through strategic litigation involving her own family.

It is a slow way to win, but it is how rights have moved across much of Europe — and Albania has a particular reason to care what Strasbourg thinks. ECtHR rulings carry weight here, and the European Convention on Human Rights is not an abstraction for a country whose entire political project right now is European Union membership.

Why EU accession changes the math

Albania is in the thick of EU accession negotiations, working through the clusters and benchmarks that membership requires. Fundamental rights — including protection from discrimination and, increasingly, recognition of LGBTQ+ family life — sit squarely inside that process. Brussels has been clear, repeatedly, that rule-of-law and rights chapters are not box-checking exercises.

This gives Albanian LGBTQ+ advocates leverage that their counterparts elsewhere in the region don’t always have. Every accession report is a moment where the gap between Albania’s strong anti-discrimination law on paper and the lived reality of same-sex families gets measured. Albania already stands out: it has comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation and a partial ban on conversion practices, which is more than most of its neighbors can say. What it still lacks is legal gender recognition and any form of relationship or family recognition. The “parent” debate is the leading edge of that second gap.

The slur, in context

None of this excuses what happened on air, and it shouldn’t be sanitized. Hate speech aimed at a named activist during a national broadcast is exactly the kind of thing that monitoring groups across the Western Balkans flag every Pride season — homophobic and sexist narratives spiking in traditional and social media through June, often aimed at the most visible people in the movement. Karaj has been that visible person for over a decade, which makes her both a target and, not coincidentally, the reason the conversation is happening at all.

What’s worth holding onto is the shape of the moment. A decade ago, there was no televised debate about the word “parent” in Albania because the question wasn’t on the table. Now it is, and the people who oppose it are reduced to slurs because they have run out of arguments that work in a country trying to convince Europe it belongs. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, what progress tends to look like up close — loud, unpleasant, and unmistakably a sign that the ground is moving.

The families are already here. Sooner or later, the paperwork will have to admit it.

This article touches on hate speech and discrimination. If you’re an LGBTQ+ person in Albania or the wider Balkans looking for support, organizations like Aleanca LGBT and Streha provide community resources and assistance.