Conversation with Andrés Rivera
When did you adopt the identity you have now?
Since 2003 but when I was 27-years-old, a psychologist gave me a document to read about transsexuals. I’m 43-years-old now. Transsexual issues are still very new. Latin American only had documents in Spanish to read about it 10 years ago. When I read about transsexuals I knew that is what I was. I knew I was not a woman but also that I was not a lesbian, I was always clear with that. When I was a child I called myself Andrés. If I played mum and dad games, I was the dad. I always played football. I identified with all masculine things. I am talking from the social point of view of what is masculine and feminine. I was the smallest daughter, I had the best dresses and dolls but I didn’t like dresses and I destroyed the dolls. You always know.
What difficulties did you have in education?
I remember as a child a teacher put me in front of the class and asked all the other children to shout out to me that I was “Maria tres cocos”, that means “amachado” like a man. Of course I was terrible at school, I was very aggressive, I used my fists. I was never at home. I left school. I was like the Tasmanian Devil. Teachers were violent with students and it is very hard, they encourage students to also be violent, to reject, humiliate and discriminate those who are different.
At university I was different. At school I was a terrible student but at university I was the best. Everybody talked to me like I was like a man but as I was also very intelligent, I was accepted. I started to teach and then I became a professor. So I earned a lot of respect, but intellectual respect. It wasn’t respect as a human being but they respected me because I was the teacher and if someone said something about me, they would have to suffer the consequences.
It’s a very critical point. When I started working I was the “amachado”, I never wore a dress, I always wore trousers and people criticised me. They said I was a lesbian and that every woman around me were my lovers.
Education is a social matter, didn’t you feel isolated?
I was the most lonely person you had ever seen. I wasn’t social at all. I never went to a birthday party, I never visited my friend’s houses, I was never married until very recently. Just two years ago I started to live in a relaxed way. I was very shy. I felt distressed to think about how to dress and that people would judge me for it. I preferred be at home and watch movies.
When did you start work with the trans population?
In 2003 I was interviewed by a television program where I didn’t show my face and did not want to be recognized in anyway but I was. Between 2003 to 2005 I couldn’t work, I was expelled from everywhere so I was in a deep depression, became an alcoholic and tried to kill myself. When I recovered from that, working with a psychiatrist, what she taught me was to allow others to discriminated against me but to treat it like it was nothing. My brothers were ashamed of me. I didn't see my nephew for four years. When this happened to me I thought I deserved it. When I noticed that I didn’t deserve it, that I was a human being as any other, just then I received phone calls from other transsexuals that watched the show and wanted to talk with me. The television program asked me if they could give them my email and we were talking for about six months until one day, before Christmas, I invited them to my place. Then that started the idea to do something. We continued to meet each other and in June we created our organization with a legal status. This organization was born because of the anger, hate and helplessness we felt at that time. That encouraged my fight, my activism. It wasn’t natural, it was motivated by all the anger, hate and resentment, but I was able to change that feeling into something positive.
Today I have no more anger against my family. I have no hate or resentment. Today my position has changed. They lost a very important moment in my life, that was my change. They lost the construction of Andrés. I feel very sorry for them but if at any time they want to come to me, I will be the first to hug them. This organization allowed me to change my point of view. Today it is not necessary to feel anger or hate for fighting. Today I feel happy for those who we help, for the mother that cares and is also happy for her son who is able to transform himself. I feel happy for that person who was alone and now finds others like him, fourteen like him, who also support him and help him. I feel happy for that brother who recognizes his brother as a man and is ok with that. There are a lot of reasons to be happy now. There is no more negative feelings.
What is the name of your institution and how many work with you?
The institution is Transsexuals for the Dignity of Diversity Organization (Organizacion de Transexuales por la Dignidad de la Diversidad, OTD) in Chile. Is a non-profit organization but is not categorized as NGO, it is a functional organization, as is named by my country’s law. It is address in Rancagua, is the sixth region, about hundred and a half kilometres from Santiago de Chile. OTD was found on June 17th, 2005.
Today there are 36 people working there, 22 transsexual men, our partners, brothers, sisters and a mother of a transsexual man. There are three more transsexual men who are in touch with us, one is 15-years-old, we will meet him soon to give him all the psychological support and attention that he will need.
There are partners, brothers and sisters. All are very important in activism, in the fight for our rights. Without partners support it could be very difficult and it is necessary because is also their fight; mothers, brothers and sisters. It doesn’t matter if you are heterosexual, bi or whatever. In the organization we give some psychological support and workshops in sexual issues. This is the most difficult one for our partners and mothers, so they get some help and skills to understand what is going on with them and with the rest of us. The mother who works with us, she attends all the meetings and she is creating a network of transsexual’s mothers.
Which is the program in OTD that works with the trans population?
We are a trans organization, one hundred percent. We don’t work with gay or lesbian issues. We are exclusively trans.
We work with hospital’s network and health. That means we give free support. There is a psychologist to help with the first step. That happens when you say you can’t continue this way but you don’t know how to talk with your family, how to confront society, what are your emotional tools for self control and to be prepared for the blow. Because you are going to receive blows, that is for sure. So the first step is to give the guy psychological support, so he could develop skills to receive the first punch. It is going to be a punch but we don’t want him to be knocked out by it. Then we create a psychological and psychiatrist network to have access to hormonal treatment and also surgeries to then ask for the change of name and sex.
Do you count on voluntary work? Isn’t it very hard to find?
Yes. We have two psychologists, one psychiatrist, three social assistants, one sociologist, one kinesiology, two nurses, two lawyers all of them give their work voluntarily.
Did you make a notification?
People become very worried about trans problems because we try to show what is going on with us. We appear in television programs and we could motivate many professionals. For example, social assistants are from my work, I work at Rancagua Municipality (Municipalidad de Rancagua), I’m a financial advisor. Lawyers come from my political work.
They come to you?
Of course. Psychologists come from a workshop that we did in “gendarmería” they are police officers in charge of prisons. So we talked about transsexuals and they were very motivated, immediately they said they wanted to help so we told them of the many ways they could do it.
In the health area we support operations. They could have free operations if they don’t have insurance. I didn’t have it so I received attention as a poverty-stricken, we call that way ‘people who can’t pay’. We work with a lawyer, he presents lawsuits of change of sex and name and also gives support in discrimination situations. We also do qualifications, we have the idea to create a micro enterprise dedicated to construction for labour insertion of transsexuals. This is not only going to be for transsexuals because we need also engineers, architects and not all transsexuals could go to university. But workers are going to be transsexuals. So, we are making qualification about digital alphabetic, computers, and other jobs.
Which are OTD more relevant results?
Make transsexual men visible in Chile. Positive results in four lawsuits of change of name and sex without phalloplasty (one from 2007 and three in 2008). We are making history in Chile, we are constructing a new society, which is more fair and equal. We also had a positive result in a lawsuit of discrimination against Rancagua University. That is the first demand in our country for discrimination of gender identity. Attention in State Hospitals, psychological, psychiatric and endocrinological evaluations. Operations of mastectomy and hysterectomy that were paid for by the State when the patient didn’t have any money. We had presented a Law of Gender Identity that is now in revision. We met with senators and members of parliament to talk about discrimination against feminine trans and we explained our demands. We talked in schools and participated in seminaries about transsexuals and human rights, all around Chile. We received funding from Astraea for work with trans population during 2007 and 2008. We had participated in OEA, Panamá. For the very first time LGBTTTI organization are invited to declarate at OEA, Andrés Rivera is one of the speakers. Also Andrés Rivera participated at MULABI, international organization that created “International Observatory for Transsexuals Human Rights” integrated by Chile, Brasil and Argentina. Andrés Rivera is in charge for Chile. We also participate at Catholics for a Free Choice Seminary and Gender and HIV/AIDS seminary in South Africa. OTD is an group integrated of OEA and also is a member of the political debate in Chile.
I think for all this, the most important is to be a visible transsexual man because we are talking about a country and a society that didn’t know that transsexuals men existed. There are no writings in any play, poem or song, we don’t exist. Today Chile knows we exist, that transsexual men exist and that we are fighting. Chile see us time to time in medical programs and also in political discussion about polemic issues.
As transsexual woman we suffer violence specially from police officers, does that happen also with transsexual men?
The reality of transsexual women is much more cruel, they are treated like “maricones”, in schools they suffer since they were little; shunning, physical aggression, mockery and at the end they are forced to leave. This has consequences in their future life because they won’t be qualified to work. They have to become prostitutes to survive and also are more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, STDs, alcoholism and drug addiction.
Transsexual women have to confront a discriminatory society and also Neo-Nazi groups that chase and kill them. This discrimination is also part of State (carabineros, detectives), Health Services, and so on. Some transsexual women have died waiting to be attended to because doctors refuse to cure them because they are “maricones vestidos de mujer”, without knowing they are HUMAN BEINGS.
We as transsexual men can appear in society and now we are seen as people with the same rights as any other. Justice has given two positive results about gender identity recognition. The Chilean Government doesn’t have politics for equality, respect or dignity for the trans population. We work in Rancagua with National Commission of Drug Control and we do workshops on gender identity. Now police officers (carabineros) that ten years ago hit prostitutes, transvestites and transsexual women, today they don’t do that anymore. But, insist, is a local situation. Rancagua is a small town with 254000 persons and is in a country with fourteen million people where are many police officers hit and rape, where a Mayor said that if a car hit a transvestite is not a problem because he is not worth it. A Mayor, a public authority who had been elected with our votes said that is an aberration, it is the worst.
There is strong violence against transsexual women, transsexual men do not suffer the same. Sometimes we have problems, for example, if we are driving and police stop us and see our identification, with a woman’s name, they don’t know what to do. Some of them have a bad reaction, others do not. Transsexual men don’t have aggressive discrimination because we are seen as biological men. But it is difficult for us to get work. Society is not prepared to hire a man with a woman’s name and sex. When they know we are not men they say some excuse to not hire us.
Is there HIV information for transsexual men?
There is no information or prevention for transsexual men. When I was in a consultation, I asked them if it was possible to give us a talk about prevention and sexual behaviour and the person said they don’t know how to do that. They only could do it for men who have sex with other men or with biological men. I said that instead they could give a talk about lesbian sexual behaviour, but they also didn’t know about it. There is no political agenda from Government about HIV/AIDS in relation to transsexual men. We don’t exist with regards to The Health Ministry. Ignorance is extreme in health issues.
What do you think about binary gender identities?
I’m a man with vagina. I said that and I broke the mental picture to everybody. I don’t have a problem saying I don’t have a penis. I don’t like that of woman-man, woman-vagina, man-penis because people feel strange when I say I’m a transsexual man.
It is because I’m a terrorist in my own life. I don’t feel ok following the rules. For me is not a problem being gay or lesbian because my identity is not related with my sexual orientation.
In transsexual issues, I notice everyday that I’m deeply in love with my wife and that I’m heterosexual. But if in any point I broke up with my wife and suddenly I start to have feelings for a man, should I have to deny my feelings and continue being a heterosexual? No. If I feel that, I won’t deny it. I’m going to talk about it. I’m not going to limit myself in one thing. I don’t respond to a model that society forces me to. I’m a Human Being, that is what I am, I’m more than a vagina or a penis. I am a HUMAN BEING.
