His name was Cristóbal and he was her first love. They were only five years old. Ámbar followed him to the bathroom and cheerfully looked at him while they played. Ámbar dreamed of hugging him and kissing him. But Ámbar, who was Diego back then, asked himself alone: “Why do I like a boy?” It wasn’t normal to feel that, considering he had a mother, a woman, and a father, a man. “Maybe it’s because I’ve always felt like a girl,” she thinks now, with 22 years old, sitting in a café in Providencia.
She straightens her reddish-brown hair every so often, partly taking care of it, and partly showing it off with a flawless, but subtle makeup. On a cool August afternoon, she wears a short, tight crop top leaving her navel and arms uncovered. And no, she doesn’t feel cold, she always was “sort of hot-blooded,” she says, and laughs, as cheerful as that child in love at kindergarten. She stops the conversation and eats a slice of pizza.
Nicole Murillo,
Diegui the rebel
Ámbar was always Diegui to everyone, never Diego. She drew her name with pink pencils. At the age of six and seven, she posed in the pictures imitating her aunts and her idols, Shakira, Britney Spears, and Thalía. She thought they were gorgeous and wanted to be like them. She liked to watch Rebelde, a Mexican soap opera where schoolgirls wore leather boots, tiny skirts and a lot of makeup. Being drawn to all these feminine things gave her pleasure, but also a huge frustration.
Entering school was the confirmation of this feeling of discomfort. “I was discriminated in first grade because I was too feminine for my things.” They called her “the gay boy,” but her teachers protected her and scolded the classmates who bullied her. “They tried to stop the
“I said ‘No’ to everything, I misbehaved badly and I had around five sheets of negative entries in my Classbook. I think I needed to find myself,” says Ámbar, trying to find an explanation for her behavior. Sometimes she dreamed of going to sleep and waking up as a woman, and other times, almost as if she were contenting herself with it, the dream was different: she woke up and was attracted to women. When she was 11 years old, during sixth grade, she says she finally “accepted it.” “I said to myself, I’m gay.”
She was kicked out of school the following year.
She began attending another school in March —“the one that accepted me.” There she met other gay boys and “I came out of the closet big time,” she says. She was turning into a teenager and her relationship with her mother began to become strained. “My mom suffered a lot; not much because I was feminine, but because I used to hang out a lot.” She gave her permission to go out one day during the weekend, but Ámbar vanished on Friday, Saturday and even Sunday. She drank and smoked too much. Looking back, she thinks her search turned into self-destruction.
Although she had kissed some boys before, and even had some girlfriends, “whom I disgusted kissing,” it was at that time when she began to have her first relations with men. When she was 14, she remembers having a boyfriend where their relationship lasted about a year.
“Diego, are you gay?” asked her mother from time to time. “No, Mom,” answered Ámbar over and over again. His head echoed “Tell her, tell her you’re gay,” but she was too afraid to utter those words. Even after accepting her homosexuality, and having told herself that she didn’t care what anyone else thought, and whether her family supported her or not, she was not ready for that kind of exposure.
Until one day, when she was 15 years old, her mother asked her for the last time:
- Diego, are you gay?
- Yes, Mom, I’m gay.
Ámbar left her mother’s house, where she lived with her two sisters, and went to live with her grandmother from his mother’ side, Juana María. At her mother’s, she secretly cross-dressed —wearing her elder sister’s clothes, her mother’s heels, and a towel on her head,
“I tightened the whole thing, from the socks to—I don’t know—the shirt; all was tightened. Yes, tight shirts, very tight T-shirts and pants like leggings. I tightened them by hand myself, and my mom would tighten them sometimes for me using a machine.”
When she had freed herself from everything she could, she had a change of heart. She wondered whether she should try to be a ‘man.’ “If fate had made me
“It wasn’t my thing. It didn’t really work out. I didn’t feel like myself.”
She failed her penultimate grade of secondary education thrice, the last time on purpose, and finished her secondary education by completing two years in one when she was 18 years old. Those were complicated times for Ámbar. She had a hard time finding a job because she looked too feminine. She then found some YouTube videos where Mexican trans girls showed their transition on a monthly basis and the effect hormones had on their bodies. She says that it was only then she knew what being a transgender was like. “I didn’t want to be a man dressed as a woman and I didn’t know I could take hormones.”
It took her two years to figure out what she wanted to do. She wondered what her parents would say, what would happen if she regretted her decision. She didn’t want to go to a psychologist. Finally, she asked herself, “Ok, Diego, what do you want to be? Do you want to be a woman or do you want to be a gay boy?” “And I chose to be a woman.”
Certificate in hand
Ámbar’s mother had a dream. “A couple of days ago, I dreamt that you were going to get breasts,” she said the day Ámbar told her that she was a transgender. She was carrying a certificate from her counseling that the psychologist had given to her. “I needed support, so they wouldn’t think this was a prank, something temporary, like being a Pokémon.” (a former urban tribe from Chile, not the videogame.) Ámbar cried, followed by her mother, and then her younger sister. They told her they were going to support her and then she began her transition.
She made an appointment with an endocrinologist recommended to her, in a private medical center. “Because I would have waited a year to have an appointment with him if I had made the appointment through the public health system,” she says. Her father, who lives in Calama, has paid for her consultations and tests, but she has paid for the hormones. While he has always supported her from a financial standpoint, he has had a hard time accepting Ámbar’s transition. “He told me that my ass was mine and that I could do whatever I wanted with it —he was not going to interfere with what I wanted to be.”
Ámbar returned to her mother’s house, but she visits her grandmother from time to time to celebrate the progress of her treatment and the changes she is noticing. She feels that she has changed a lot, but she knows that she still has a long way to go. “I think only in two years I’ll be seeing more dramatic changes.” She feels sensitive at times, “like when women have their periods,” and she cries over “silly things.”
Currently, Ámbar is not working. She says she is “focused on her well-being
“It’s hard to find work like this. It was difficult already when I was a ‘feminine boy’, but now it’s even
After waiting for four months, in August, she underwent an expert psychological and sexological assessment before the Legal Medical Service (SML). The whole procedure is such a bummer for her, but above all “it’s pretty much as having to certify that you are not fucked-up so they allow you to change your gender, even though I feel like a normal person, with all my abilities intact.”
- What other changes do you want to make?
- I want to get breasts and a rhinoplasty. And then, giving me a treat, like getting a butt lift, something like that.
- And a genital transformation surgery?
- I don’t want to have sex reassignment surgery. Having a penis doesn’t make me any less or more of a woman, really. I like belonging to a third gender. Becoming normal, a binary woman, with vagina is no fun. I like being like this, to be more exotic, more eye-catching.
There is a challenging tone in Ámbar’s words. She says that she is aware that many people can tell that she’s a trans kilometers ahead and so what. She does not want to “go unnoticed,” she wants people to think she’s a woman, but she also wants them to know she was a man before. This has gotten her into trouble. They hardly yell “gay” or “fag” at her anymore, but they harass her now instead. “I’ve been followed by guys masturbating, I’ve been offered sex many times on the street —One night, while I went back home, a guy grabbed me from behind and acted as if he was going to rape me.”
- What did you do?
- I gave him a blow. He was so shocked that he went away and left me alone.
- Were you afraid?
- No fear. If they shout things at me in the street, I’ll face them again. Let them say it to my face. And if they want to hit me, let them hit me, I don’t care.
Many things have changed, but Ámbar is still as rebellious as Diegui.
