Today, in Sweden, you can become a woman or a man legally without having to undergo sterilization and gender reassignment. But that wasn't the case when Vanessa López was a 17-year-old boy. Therefore, she then chose to begin the treatment that would correct the body to the soul. For the choice to undergo physical gender reassignment, she has paid a heavy price.
In the book, Vanessa talks about the methods she had to resort to become the woman she is today. How, as a minor teenager, she ended up on the street where a single misstep could lead to risky situations, and how the health care system treated a teenager who was stuck in the wrong body, something that neither she nor society could accept.
This is not a book for the one with scruples as this true story takes the reader on an intimate journey that answers many questions about transsexualism and is guaranteed not to leave anyone unmoved.
Vanessa López was born in 1983 in Chile. She grew up in Malmö but now lives in Stockholm. It is her first book. She also works as an activist, freelance writer, and lecturer.
I interviewed Vanessa in 2014 and this is what she told me about the book: "Many transgender women say to me that they are not two-spirited, that they are only girls and girls should have a vagina to be completed. But my question to them is always the same: why do you hate your gender?
The answer is often that they feel like a woman completely and that they want to feel whole. But if our society wasn’t based on the strict binary gender constructions that say that a man should have a penis and a girl a vagina, would we feel the need to correct people’s gender identity to the body at all? If it was socially acceptable to have a female gender identity and live in a boy body, not so many would go through the SRS and HRT!"
Available via adlibris.com
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