Imagine you are at a birthday party. You do not know many people there, and by chance you sit next to a young woman you have never met before. She seems approachable, the conversation warms up, and suddenly you realize she is trans. For many people, this becomes the perfect moment to unload a flood of questions, questions rarely asked with bad intentions, but often intrusive, repetitive, or simply exhausting for the person receiving them. When did you know you were trans? What did your parents say? Have you had surgery? How do you have sex? Don’t trans women have an advantage in sports?
It is this all-too-familiar scenario that inspired Valentina Berr’s La respuesta a todo lo que le preguntarías a una tía trans (The Answer to Everything You Would Ask a Trans Aunt), published by Editorial Egales. In this book, Berr flips the script: instead of being cornered by strangers, she takes the initiative and writes down all the answers herself, with humor, warmth, and disarming honesty.
The idea is simple but powerful. Many trans women have experienced being turned into unwilling teachers at social gatherings, forced into conversations about their past, their bodies, and their most intimate details with people they hardly know. Berr acknowledges this paradox, recognizing that the questions will keep coming whether or not she wants them to. So she decides to create a safe space in which curiosity can be satisfied without causing harm. She invites readers to imagine that she is that trans woman at the party, and the book is the conversation you might secretly want to have. But this time, she is in control. “Today, that girl is me, and this book will be that conversation,” she writes. “Here you will find the answers to all the ‘Can I ask you something?’ questions you can think of about being trans.”
