Self-Made Woman: A Transgender Latina Tells Her Story
Sometimes I think that women don’t appreciate their bodies, themselves and their own power enough. I know, because as a transgender woman, my female body has been 15 years in the making. I’ve worked extremely hard to build what you have been born with. As a little boy growing up with my grandparents in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, I used to watch my aunts put on makeup and clothes for hours. I was very feminine. When I went out, people sometimes thought I was a little girl. My hair was always really nice, so my grandmother let it grow a bit long; my grandfather used to yell at me for resting on one hip when I stood or fluttering my fingers when I spoke. In school, kids called me Palomita. However, what I felt was different from identifying as gay: What I saw in the mirror and what people saw were different from how I felt inside. I was meant to be a girl. But that didn’t become clear to me until I was 18 and living on my own in Reno, Nev. One Halloween, I dressed up as a woman—black and wh...