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CUBA: Wendy -
Reconciling the Inner and Outer Image
By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA (IPS) - It was as if she had only closed
her eyes for a moment. When Wendy Iriepa came round
after surgery over a year ago, she tried to get up as if
nothing had happened, but a nurse gently pushed her back
into bed. "All done?" she asked, and the nurse replied,
"Yes."
"I wanted to look at myself, and I managed to feel how I
was now. That thing I had had to live with for 33 years
of my life was gone for good," Iriepa, a Cuban
transsexual who had the sexual reassignment operation
approved by the Public Health Ministry in 2008, told IPS.
"When they finally removed my bandages, I went to the
bathroom and I saw my reflection in a huge mirror. It
was the happiest moment of my life. The 16 days I spent
in hospital were neither an ordeal nor a form of
imprisonment for me, but a spiritual liberation that
freed my soul," she said.
As she tells her story, the tears flow again. But since
her operation, her tears have been mostly of happiness.
Basically she is still the same person, a hard worker
and a stubborn rebel, yet she has also changed, and not
just physically. Powerlessness and all its consequences
are buried in the past along with that burden that was
"always dragging me down."
Her reflection in the mirror was her constant companion,
every day. She would go to the bathroom and see that "up
above I was one thing, and down below another." In the
morning she would bind her genitals in tight underpants
that marked and irritated her skin. She would try to
regard "it" as if it were just like an arm, and put
cream on it, looking after that skin because, like it or
not, "it was part of me."
"I felt no pain with the operation, and if I did feel
any, it was nothing compared to what I lived with before
in society, as I told the surgeon. To me, it was as if
my female genitals had always been there, and what I
actually had previously was only a mask, something that
hid the real shape that was already there," she said.
Wendy's worlds
The first child, and only son, born to a working class
family, she soon discovered she was not what her father
wished her to be. At the age of three she played with
dolls, and when she started school she cut the shorts of
her uniform to make skirts instead, and tied towels
around her head to imitate long hair.
At the age of 10 she had her first relationship, with a
teacher, one of the few people who gave her affection at
a time when she was being criticised and censured by her
parents and fellow primary school pupils. One day the
head teacher called her and said, "either you leave
school or I'll tell your parents about you."
"That's when I started hanging out at my cousin's house.
She would lend me her dresses and her bathing suits to
go to the beach; I would hide my genitals and I lived
life as a girl. The problems with my father continued,
until I left home when I was 12. When I went back two
years later, I already had breasts," she said.
She had heard her sister say that a contraceptive pill
was enlarging the size of her breasts and, without
consulting anyone, she started taking two pills a day.
It was like a religious rite for her, and it was one of
the major turning points of her life. "I began to dress
as a woman; my father would say 'you look like a clown,'
but when I looked in the mirror that wasn't what I saw."
"It was hard work for me to live down this change in my
neighbourhood. People would shout and jeer at me, but
away from my area, men saw me as a woman, as the person
I felt I was and who I had struggled to be all my life.
When all the men, everyone from doctors to policemen,
made flirtatious remarks to me, I knew that this was the
way my life had to be."
She was 17 when, in 1988, she heard about the first sex
change operation performed in Cuba. She went to see the
surgeon who had done the operation, and he sent her to
see psychologists Mayra Rodríguez and Ofelia Bravo of
the National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX). Two years
later her status as a transsexual was confirmed.
"Mayra, who has been a true mother to me, made my father
understand that I really hadn't chosen to be this way,
but that there was a mismatch between my psychological
sex and my biological sex; that it wasn't a case, as my
father complained, of going against him or wanting to
disgrace the men in our family," she said.
Through CENESEX, she was able to start hormonal
treatment to feminise some of her physical attributes,
without surgery. The Centre also made the necessary
arrangements for her to change the name on her identity
document to the name she had chosen. On Jul. 7, 1997,
she was officially registered as Wendy.
But it was not all plain sailing. Her life at CENESEX
was one thing, but in the world it was quite another.
She fell in love, and was disappointed, over and over
again. She was systematically abused by one partner, and
like many others before her, she felt that prostitution
"was the only means of survival this society gave me."
Things got so bad that she locked herself into her house
and would not go out. "But time passed, I still had no
job and was living a very promiscuous life, until one
day I went to see Mayra, in tears, and I told her: I
need your help, I need a job. And I started right there,
working for the services department at CENESEX."
Five years later, she is a trusted key worker, handling
the files of people who come to the Centre looking for
help. She completed sixth grade and plans to finish
secondary school and take a secretarial course. Her
dream is eventually to attend university and take a
psychology degree.
A place in society
Of the courses she has taken at CENESEX, one of the most
important, in her view, was on her rights as a citizen:
"it turns out we have the right to wear whatever we
like, and yet the police would stop transvestites and
fine them for wearing women's clothes. Now we know our
rights, we know the law and we can insist on being
respected."
CENESEX, headed by sexologist Mariela Castro (President
Raúl Castro's daughter), promotes policies in favour of
full acceptance of people's sexual orientation and
gender identity, and campaigns against homophobia and
transphobia (discrimination against transsexual and
transgender people). In Wendy's view the Centre has
given transsexuals the tools they need "to command
greater social respect."
The group of transvestites, transsexual and transgender
people who frequent CENESEX have not only received
courses on self-image, communication and popular
education; many have also become accredited health
promotors, and participate in designing the Centre's
programmes on sexual diversity.
Some of the more active and educated of these women
frequently play a role in awareness-raising activities
in different settings, alongside CENESEX experts,
sitting on panels about sexual diversity at film
festivals, conferences or international meetings on
sexuality or AIDS.
"We are open to all who wish to get to know us, and
discover that we are not monsters and that we have not
broken social norms just because we wanted to, but
because this is the way we are, and that we deserve to
be respected. We deserve a place in society, and to be
looked upon not as strange creatures, but as people of
this society, people of these times," she said.
And in spite of knowing how much still needs to be done
before society will accept her as she is, just looking
Wendy in the eye or watching her walk through the
streets of Havana is enough to know that she is a free
and happy woman. In her view, "happiness is made up of
moments in life that you treasure inside yourself, and
they determine the direction of your life." |
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