Letter to my father. Testimony of a transsexual disabled person

This book is the testimony of Irina Echeverría, which literary version was made by Lourdes Díaz; it is the sincere story and hard example of a woman that fight to be accepted as a woman, all the sorrow, difficulties, pain and loneliness. Because transsexuality is a process very isolated, “if is one of the conditions in which people is closer to their self, they turn around and are alone”(81), that is a consequence of assume another personality, another image, another name; most of the people that knew before prefer be away, even her mother, her father and her sisters.

She start talking about annoyance and the desire of scraching, because Irina since was very little had through many operations in order to correct a problem in her back and her legs, which detain her to walk. Later for a medical mistake she will force to use a wheelchair. Because of her disease her childhood and adolescence was very hard, even more for the deep desire to be a woman. Also she lived in a very problematic family; her mother had to work for all because her father was in jail for his communist ideas.

This testimony is written as a letter to the father, a father that was far away, the revolutionary, the absent, that who tried to change the world but couldn’t change his own world, his family for one with solidarity and respect. Because Irina was the oldest son, she was taught to control her feelings, to suffer all kind of pain without tears, to be violent and indifferent. When she was a child suffer many surgeries that kept her away from Mexico and had to control her desire of trend, cried only when nobody saw her, only missing be a woman.

A consequence of her illness, all the orthopedic instruments that she had to use, she was outsider, and then also suffer exclusion for her political believes. The possibility to lose her sight gives her the courage to become a woman. And also the help and support of Neli, her wife, that show her feminine side, she learns to cry, to feel until becoming Irina. After a long process of adaptation, Irina and Neli achieve a new relationship.

Irina told us about social problems and exclusion that suffer for being part of a communist family, then for being a disabled person and then for being a transsexual, as she define herself. She lost many friends and family in this transformation. But, when she becomes a woman she also felt the persecution of men. Spite of difficult situation she had to defy, she got over her illness and felt accomplishment with her new identity. She had a good relationship with Neli and both fight together for a different world that get respect to transsexual people.