Ángela – English

In the mind of six-year-old Ángel, many adventures follow one another and there is a world full of cool characters. But one is his favorite: Ángela. She looks so much like him, he thinks, but she’s luckier because she can wear skirts and use long hair. When Ángel has lunch, he imagines Ángela having lunch instead of him, taking his place. But Ángela is not me, he tells and corrects himself. It’s just an invention, I don’t identify with this character, no.

 “It was really me, it was a projection,” she admits now, at 14.

It’s not the same Ángela in her mind that came into being, she says, but she does have long hair and wear a skirt. This is Ángela 2.0, one that Ángel probably could never have imagined. “I saw a cisgender woman in her, who could get pregnant and menstruate. I wanted to take hormones to transition and be a woman socially. I hated my body, but then I began to love it, because now I know that there is a trans identity beyond the binary.”

Good boy

Ximena Maturana (37) has two children. Ángela is the youngest of them. She was loving, tidy, responsible and obedient. From a very young age, she earned the affection of all the adults around her, whether at school or at the beach hut where they spent their summers. “He was a very sweet boy who let his mother guide him,“” says Ximena.

Her notebooks were full of colors, and she liked to play with her dolls (combing them overall), and stuffed animals at home. At the same time, she liked to collect cars. “I liked to make a city using cars,” she recalls. 

Ángela’s parents never married or lived together, but during visits, the paternal side of the family was worried about her “feminine” ways and pushed Ximena to do something. When she was four years old, they took her to a psychologist. The psychologist told them she was probably going to be gay, and that she should be allowed to develop freely, with no limits on toys or roles.

At kindergarten, educators asked children to make two rows, the boys and the girls. In her head, Angela thought, “I am a girl,” so she stood in line with the girls. “No, you are a boy,” they corrected her and made her change her row. She says she had a girlfriend, who was “more like a friend with whom they exchanged kisses,” and every time she visited her, she would have put on her dresses “and we looked after a baby doll, both of us.”

When she entered a school only for men, she simply assumed that she was wrong, that those thoughts that spun in her head would eventually fade away, and that “she was going to get over it.” But she wasn’t really comfortable there. She didn’t like to play football, because the kids were yelling and hitting each other hard, she explains. She didn’t like to yell. She talked and moved softly, and was very introvert.

Shorts, pants, sweatpants. Shirt or T-shirt. Those were the clothes Ángela wore every day. Ximena chose the clothes for her and her brother; they got out of the shower, dressed and were ready. “Deciding for children until turning 11 what they are going to wear is a sign that something is really going on” reflects her mother now. Ángela only imposed her will when it came to her Harry Potter robe and the overall. She never wanted to take them off. “I think they played the role of dressing her,” adds Ximena.

Her attitude gradually brought her more and more trouble with her father, whom she saw occasionally. She didn’t feel comfortable with him because, she says, he was very male chauvinistic, homophobic and transphobic. Eventually, she stopped seeing him. “It was a relief for me, because that meant getting someone toxic out of my life. I wasn’t sad.”

While she was free to behave as she wanted at home, Ximena knows it was a time in which Ángela repressed herself. “She must have had a hard time.” She devoted a lot of time to music (she learned to play several instruments) and drawing. That was her refuge. When she was 11, she moved to a coed school. Sharing with girls again gave rise to Ángela’s suspicions again. She began to investigate and ended up watching a video of a trans girl on YouTube. “Oh, I identify with this,” she thought.

She was too afraid to tell her mom. “I made wild guesses in my head that she was going to tell people that could hurt me later, I don’t know.” Ángela didn’t want to see her reaction when she found out.

So she wrote her a letter, left it on her bedside table when night fell, and went to bed.

She pretended to be asleep.

• What did the letter say?
• The letter was not just to tell her that I felt like a woman. I didn’t feel happy, because I had to be a person I didn’t want to be. Apart from playing the role of a man, I felt very pushed to do other things they asked me to do, in my studies and stuff like that.

Ximena knew nothing about the matter. She had never heard the word ‘trans’ before, but she told Ángela that she was going to support her. “It was the opposite of what I thought she was going to tell me,” Ángela admits. They began a long journey through psychologists. One of them even told her that she was going to be “cured.” Finally, she says, one understood her and told her mother: “She is Ángela; you have to treat her as such.”

That’s when they decided to start the transition.

Powerful

In July 2016, Ángela began her transition. She was moved when her mother called her by her feminine name. Finally, she was able to wear the skirts and dresses she so longed for. She finally let her hair grow, because “socially speaking, women must have long hair.” It took time to grow and she became impatient, putting headbands on. Then makeup followed. First, it was lipstick, and then she began to add new things. “At first I used too much make up,” she says.

Ximena says that Ángela stopped being so sweet, and turned rather unfriendly. “One associates it with adolescence as well, but I think that, above all, she managed to empower herself and get her voice out.” Raising a girl is something else, she says. Ángela can take an hour and a half, even two hours, in getting ready to go out. What does she do all that time? She chooses her clothes, watches makeup videos, does her makeup, does her hair and gets “caught thinking in something else,” she adds.

She stopped going to school in September. They closed her year before, because she wanted to continue her transition calmly at home. She returned in 2017 to the same school that, she admits, had the entire disposition to support her. But she couldn’t go on. “Everyone knew me as Ángel, so they had a hard time treating me like Ángela, and that eventually made me feel uncomfortable.” She spent the rest of the year at home. All she did was to use the computer. She got bored.

She planned to take free exams at the end of that year, but finally she regretted it, because “she didn’t feel ready.”

With her mother, they set out to look for a school the following year. Ángela wanted a secular school with few students. There were no much options. She went through raffles and admission tests. She didn’t get admitted in any of them.

Ximena was already an active participant in the Selenna Foundation, where the Amaranta Gómez School project was being developed. She found out the location of the Neighborhood Council’s headquarters at the Olympic Village, which is one block from her apartment, to teach classes there.ngela was the first one that enrolled.

Both have been the protagonists of the many articles published about the school. They and all students overall, are used to cameras, photographers and journalists. They already have a partially memorized speech on how the school has changed their lives. Ángela says that she likes it very much, that they have taught her things there that are very different from formal education, but that she also needs to study more. By the end of this year she should be sitting open exams. She’s a year behind.

One day after school, Ángela gives another interview. She is alone in one of the classrooms. Only her soft, slow voice interrupts the silence. She adjusts her skirt to sit on. She adjusts her glasses to listen to the question.

• Do you want to change your legal name?
• No, I find that I would make myself invisible as a trans person. I am not so convinced of what the Act promises. For instance, I have the same sex I’ve always had, I haven’t taken hormones, and I haven’t undergone surgery. What happens if tomorrow I make the change and I get, I don’t know, testicle cancer, are they going to guarantee me I will have access to a health treatment?
• Because your documents will say that you are a woman…
• Sure.
• And do you eventually want to undergo hormonal treatment or surgery?
• There was a time when that was an issue for me. They usually tell you that making the transition involves taking hormones, but then I realized that it was not so necessary. So is taking blockers. I like my body. I broke free from that pressure to fulfill the woman stereotype.
• So nothing has changed in your body with the transition.
• I had laser hair removal though. I hate hair.

Ángela’s family has slowly adapted to the changes that followed her transition. For Ximena, it wasn’t just about respecting her daughter’s identity; it was about hand over a space that had always been hers. “I was the only woman among many siblings, I was always the princess, the focus of everything, and we began to fight over a lot for that space. At first it was quite chaotic,” she recalls.

Still, her family never ceased to support her. “I prefer mother-daughter to mother-son, because I feel that we have had the opportunity to learn together in this process,” says Angela.

Since Ángela has decided to allow her body to continue developing, she knows that certain male sexual characteristics will begin to emerge with the passage of puberty. She says she is not afraid of what people will say on the street, or what will happen to her in the future. Anything can happen to anyone, and that’s not going to stop her, she says.

Her mother and grandfather are the ones wondering what will happen. They have to deal with their fears and concerns. Ximena eventually becomes absorbed in some argument because someone gave Ángela a strange look or said something to her. She can’t help it. She is a girl, she says, her little girl, and she feels the need to defend her.

Angela turns a deaf ear or ignores it. Sometimes she admits those looks make her uncomfortable when she is more sensitive, but she quickly forgets. She has more important things to think about. She would like to study Psychology or Photography. What about family? “I picture myself with animals, maybe rabbits, maybe a partner, but never with children. I can’t picture myself with children.”

And well, like any teenager, Ángela also thinks about things that are not so important.

“I really like K-Pop music. I really enjoy dancing. There’s a song called Time for the moon night, I’m kind of obsessed with it.”

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