Angie, a 29-year-old transsexual working as a hairdresser and volunteer transsexuality coordinator for COLEGA, left her home in Venezuela two years ago in search of social acceptance, internal peace, and a government-funded gender reassignment operation in Spain.
by Valerie Hartshorn
In Venezuela they don't have the word “transsexual.” They just say gay or lesbian. But we're not gay. Society has this misconception that you choose to be gay or transsexual. But gays are born gay, and it's the same for transsexuals. Currently there is a campaign to change the word from “disorder” to “dysphoria” because transsexuality is not a disorder or sickness. Rather, transsexuality is a gender dysphoria: We're born in a different body than our minds tell us. We all have the capability to reason, and we know that outwardly our body says “male” while inwardly, we feel and act femininely. We are female. From the youngest age, I behaved and lived my life like a girl. My parents supported me. They were used to it.
IdentityYou have a female identity, and at that period of time around 11, 12, even 13 or 14 years old, you start to think “Why do I feel this way? Why do I feel like a girl and I'm inside of a boy's body?” Then, absolutely, there is a lot of confusion. At that age I wasn't dressing like I girl. Before 18 or 19 I lived life normally: I wore unisex clothing that wasn't too girly but also not too masculine. I didn't wear makeup and my hair was somewhere in between short and kind of long for a boy. You have to know that in Venezuela the life of transsexuals is difficult. It's hard. People are very closed-minded. You see, transsexual life is much more obvious than, say, homosexual life. But I didn't hide it from anyone. Of the few friends I had, the majority were straight girls, which is due to the sense of machismo that males have and their tendency to reject gender disparities more quickly than girls.
RejectionWhat's true, too, is the fact that a lot of times we don't finish high school or go to college because of this rejection. And remember that we're not gay. Gays don't want to physically be men or women, they just like men or women. For us it's different. We're not going to behave like the boys we look like because inwardly, we don't feel like the image our body projects. My teachers didn't defend me when the boys would harass me. They said the teasing was my fault, that I was provoking them and that it would be better for me to just act like the boy that I am. But I couldn't do that. As far as education goes, I got my adult bachillerato degree [Spanish two-year course for academically oriented 16 to 18-year-olds] at age 24. I wanted to study, I was serious about eventually getting a good job, but the rejection at my public high school was too much.
SocietyNow? Yes, I do feel a little more accepted. The government is working on a transsexual integration law that is meant to make us feel more accepted in this society, and part of this is our desire for acceptable jobs. Imagine transsexual women working as prostitutes; they're not becoming assimilated by any means, they're being criticized and judged by the rest of society. The fact is we need this law to help better integrate ourselves, and I think that it will be passed, especially because they passed the law in 2006 allowing us to change our names on birth certificates and official documents. As far as that law goes, the requirement is two years of hormone treatment in order to legally change your name. But now we're also fighting to be able to change the gender that is listed on those official documents. It doesn't do anybody any good to change their name and still have it say “male” after the person has been operated on and is now female.
The process
I came to Colega [the association of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals], had an interview with the psychologist, and he sent my paperwork to the Carlos Haya Hospital in Malaga where I was put under the care of a hospital psychologist. It takes between six and eight appointments with the psychologist for him refer you to an endocrinologist and then begin hormone treatments. But the timing is not restricted to a matter of months; you could end up waiting a whole year to be cleared by the psychologist. Every person is different.
I think it's more advisable to undergo this process by way of an association, like Colega, although you can do it by just going to a psychologist. After beginning the process of hormone treatments, you have to wait one and a half to two years for the operation. The entire time, you continue the hormones. Those we have to take forever, for the rest of our lives. Because my body will continue to produce the hormones it is naturally programmed to produce, I will always have to take female hormones to counteract the male ones and it's the same thing for transsexual women.
The surgeryThis is what they tell us from the beginning: The decision to be operated is yours. It's how you feel. If you're comfortable without the surgery, then that's what you're comfortable with. And if someone doesn't go through with the surgery, it's only because of fear. I don't think it has anything to do with confusion or that all of a sudden the person feels like the sex of the body they have. Once you've begun the hormones, confusion is no longer something that keeps someone from surgery. I know someone who, when the moment came for her to be anesthetized, she didn't want to have the surgery anymore. She kept saying no and they just had to stop. She was scared. Me? I'm not scared. I am completely sure that surgery is what I want. And you have to be completely sure on whether or not you want the surgery.
It takes between four and six hours for the sex change. Technically it's called sex reassignment surgery. It costs between 30,000 to 36,000 euros for breast implants, and 108,000 to 120,000 euros for the sex reassignment operation from male to female. I don't know about female to male reassignment. I think it costs around 24,000 euros to remove the breasts. Social security covers the costs of the sex reassignment surgery, but not breast implants because that can be ruled as something aesthetic, like plastic surgery for breast augmentation. Remember that both the male and female bodies have mammary glands although only the female body produces the hormones that cause the mammary glands to create breast tissue. Since we're taking the female hormones, our bodies are producing breast tissue, so breast implants are seen as more of a want than a need. Because the region of Andalusia provides sex reassignment operations that are covered by social security, you have people coming from all over Spain and other countries to have the operations. We, Andalusians, are given first priority, and then other Spaniards, and then foreigners. The waiting list is not short. There is a separate list, a more urgent one. I have a friend who will be operated on sooner than others who are waiting. She only has one testicle, only one, and because of that she needs to have the other removed. In her case, she's extremely uncomfortable with her body and she needs to be operated on. So she's on the urgent list.
WaitingI still don't know when I'll go in for surgery. I'm on the list and the list is long—I don't know how many people are on it. Inwardly, I am at peace with myself; outwardly, no, since I still have male genitals. But in comparison to others who are very much at odds with their bodies, I'm at peace. I have been ever since the process began. The hormones help a lot because you can watch your body become more feminine, you see the changes take place. And now that we've begun the hormones, we know that the time is coming to be operated on. Surely, it will come.
Quieres que te cuente de mi semestre en Sevilla. En una palabra: crecimiento. Por eso, esta foto del árbol con sus ramas alcanzando al cielo es la imagen más descriptiva de los últimos meses. Como dice Eduardo del Campo en su libro De Estambul a El Cairo, la única cosa que nos prohibe de actuar es el miedo: el miedo de que va a pasar en el próximo momento, el miedo del cambio, el miedo de lo que no conocemos. Todos de estos pensamientos me daban miedo en las semanas antes de mi salida para España.
