Frida Cartas - How to be trans and be murdered in the attempt

2023, English, Frida Cartas,

"How to be trans and be murdered in the attempt" is the English language edition of "Cómo ser trans y morir asesinada en el intento" by Frida Cartas.

For Frida Cartas, transsexuality, or being a trans woman, does not mean a "transition", or a "change" from A to B, a "person who stopped being X to become Y"... Nor any of these stories that are generally society (through discourses of inclusion) who adjudicate them via sociocultural patterns and standards, and that are repeated even by the same people, trans women and men.

For Frida Cartas, being a trans woman is an expropriation of her own body, previously stolen precisely by these patterns and standards. For Frida Cartas to be a trans woman is to have done justice to herself, within a world in which it seems that no woman has justice. If, as Marx pointed out, we must take the means of production, Frida took the first and most hers: her body and all the sexuality that inhabits it, then she not only began to build and produce, but also to do politics. A work that has earned her the derision and the simplistic and light criticism of those who do not support collectivity and self-management.

This book is a peculiar, acidic, intense, and powerful autobiography, narrated by herself, tired of the fact that it is always doctors, psychiatrists, the church, sexologists, "science", "specialists", who opine and determine, something that obviously do not go through from experience, much less from the body. 

For Frida Cartas, naming herself trans is not the counterpart of anything or anyone, but the evidence that the "trans" was simply the possible way to name that resignification of the woman she always was, who did not "make" one day, who did not "discover" suddenly, "who did not "appear" when putting on a dress, "who did not "materialize" when achieving an administrative gender identity, but it was always there, resisting until it became visible.

Frida Cartas is a feminist, activist for the human rights of women and girls; Mexican, born in the hot, violent and quasi-border north of Mexico. One day so casually she fled her homeland and began to feministly question her sexual identity (gender, orientation, and politics). She then became transsexual and was also discovered to have an intersex condition from birth. A whole case of gunpowder.

She currently writes for different print and electronic media, is a workshop leader on issues of human sexuality with a gender and human rights perspective, accompanies women who have abortions, mothers with daughters in femicides, women in situations of mourning or depression, and freelances as a fundraiser for feminist projects in AC's or NGOs, although if they ask her how she defines herself, She will say that she is just a feminist writer, a happy woman, and a radical housewife and domestic worker. She does not like people and prefers to socialize with cats.

Available via Amazon

Photo via Twitter.