She lived and wrote with courage and perseverance, but also with fear. Because she grew up in a time when there was no room for women like her. Because she could be 'exposed'. And she was, over and over again. It was Valérie against the world.
"Madam" is published because Valérie is no longer afraid. To show how we dealt with people who do not fit into specific boxes. It's time for her story.
And so it happened that at the age of eighteen, eleven years after child protection placed me under supervision and my parents pledged to take good care of me, I was practically illiterate, without any education, convinced that I was in the wrong body locked up, with a train ticket, seven guilders fifty and a garbage bag of worn-out clothes, returned penniless to the place where I had been taken from when I was seven, under supervision of me, locked up in the wrong body.
