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.
