Moi, Giovanna: Une enfance trans à Bogotá is not simply a memoir, it is an act of survival put into words, a narrative that refuses silence and respectability alike. Written by Giovanna Rincon with the close, attentive collaboration of Stéphanie Malphettes, the book unfolds as a coming-of-age story forged in violence, tenderness, fear and stubborn joy. From the first pages, the reader understands that this is not a story told from a safe distance. It is lived experience, recalled with clarity and urgency, shaped by memory and by the political necessity of telling the truth.
Giovanna is born in Bogotá in 1969, into a poor and unstable household. Her father is a cobbler, her mother a housewife, and money, affection and security are all scarce. From childhood, she knows she is a girl, even though she has been assigned a boy’s name and body. This certainty is not presented as confusion or questioning, but as something deeply rooted, quiet and unshakeable. The world around her, however, has no place for that truth. Her father is violent, deceitful, humiliating, and the home becomes a space of constant tension. Masculinity is imposed on her like a punishment, through gestures, postures and expectations she never chose. The book captures this suffocation with painful precision, showing how gender norms are enforced not only through words, but through daily cruelty.
At twelve, Giovanna runs away. It is both an escape and a leap into the unknown. She spends months on the streets, experimenting with a clandestine hormone regimen made of contraceptive pills, learning far too early how dangerous visibility can be for a trans child. When she returns home six months later, she does not come back alone. She has a boyfriend, a fragile promise of love and protection. Yet even this relationship forces her to compromise. To be loved, she must temporarily suspend her femininity. The book never romanticizes these moments. Instead, it shows how survival often requires painful negotiations with oneself.
By fifteen, Giovanna takes flight again, this time with determination. She opens her own hair salon, an astonishing act of independence for someone so young. For a while, she reconciles with her family and becomes their main source of financial support. Bogotá, however, is not kind to trans women. Violence is omnipresent, murders are common, bodies are found in the streets at dawn. The city itself feels like an antagonist, hostile and predatory. Yet Giovanna insists. She claims her name, her gender, her place in the world. There is defiance in her insistence, a refusal to disappear.
Throughout the book, the collaboration with Stéphanie Malphettes is discreet but essential. Malphettes, a former journalist who later became a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, listens, structures, and helps transform lived chaos into a coherent narrative without stripping it of its rawness. The result is a text that feels intimate without being voyeuristic, political without becoming didactic. Their friendship, born in 2017 during an investigation into HIV-related discrimination, infuses the book with trust and mutual respect.
The later chapters trace Giovanna’s arrival in Paris in 2002, initially to help a childhood friend dying of AIDS. France becomes a place of activism rather than refuge. Rejected from mainstream employment because she is trans, pushed back toward prostitution by institutions meant to help, Giovanna turns anger into action. In 2010, she co-founds Acceptess-T, an organization dedicated to supporting trans people facing extreme precarity, especially migrants, sex workers and people living with HIV. The book makes it clear that her activism is born from lack, lack of love, lack of money, lack of shelter, and from the refusal to let others endure the same abandonment.
What makes Moi, Giovanna particularly powerful is its constant oscillation between life and death, softness and brutality, rage and love. Giovanna does not present herself as a saint or a symbol. She speaks of fear, compromises, mistakes, exhaustion. At the same time, the book insists on dignity, on the political importance of speaking in one’s own name. This insistence resonates with her public role today as a leading figure in trans rights activism in France, co-spokesperson for the Federation of Trans and Intersex People, for sex workers’ unions, and director of Acceptess-T. Her later recognition, including the Senate’s Medal of Honor awarded in June 2025, appears not as a conclusion, but as a reminder of how long and hard-fought this journey has been.
Ultimately, Moi, Giovanna: Une enfance trans à Bogotá is a book of combat and freedom. It refuses erasure, refuses pity, refuses neat redemption arcs. It asks the reader to sit with discomfort, to acknowledge structural violence, and to recognize the humanity of those who are too often reduced to statistics or slogans. Giovanna Rincon’s story is extraordinary, but the book never lets us forget that it should not have had to be. It is a testament to resilience, yes, but also an indictment of a world that makes such resilience necessary.
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Photo by Max K Pelgrims.
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