Frida Cartas is 44 years old, but she did not “give birth” until she was 33; she was not able to take the leap and define herself as transsexual despite a life in which, from the age of five, she acted like a girl and was insulted and attacked for this in a peripheral neighborhood of Mazatlán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Now in Transport to Childhood (Almadía) she brings together hard, funny and exciting vital fragments of a lower class girl who hid her voice, a reason for jokes. A girl with a courageous mother. A survivor whose writing is now triumphing and today (8:30 p.m.) is presented at La Parcería, in Madrid, and on Thursday (7 p.m.) at the Barcelona bookstore Finestres.

Have shame and violence marked trans childhoods?

There could be another vee that is vendetta. Trans women or trans people have done justice to ourselves by breaking those barriers of violence and fear to be a little freer, happier. They are marked by violence and shame, but in the book I tried not to see it from the perspective of the victim, but to talk about the survivor.

Boys and girls hit him. And her mother, advanced for her time, is going to defend her in schools.

And from my dad, from the neighborhood, from everything. My mother was the only support she felt she could resist this. She did not understand these issues, but she did not judge them either and to the extent she accompanied them. When the book appeared, my sisters told me: ‘Frida, you had another mother, she is not ours.’ She dedicated a lot of time to me. Because she was the weakest child of hers and I think because she empathized with me because she was an immigrant from Oaxaca, from the south, and they gave her nicknames like India María.

What did they call you?

Sissy, sissy, fucking, girl. When my dad wanted to attack, and joto wasn’t enough, she was the girl.

Did you feel like a girl at five years old?

I never changed my self-perception, I knew myself the same as my sisters, a girl. But being told that made me feel guilty for being one. I was crying, but it didn’t cross my mind to be any other way.

Do you see it as paradoxical that they attacked her for being like a woman and that feminist groups rejected her?

When I came to feminism it was a kinder space, where experiences could be collectivized. When the wave of exclusionary feminism came and this somewhat right-wing view stopped being a safe space. But it is possible to heal it.

He ends the book explaining that in psychotherapy he sees that he has hidden his voice all his life.

Because when he opened his mouth came the mockery, the aggression. And you don’t fit here. And on the other side, neither. They ripped my voice out. I studied communication sciences and when I did radio for the first time I couldn’t speak. I felt like my voice was coming out, but they told me, ‘speak, you can’t hear’. Could not. It was an exercise that I had to do in therapy, to be able to raise my voice, so that it didn’t tremble so that it could be heard.

What have the years of shame and violence left in you?

Many wounds, but I no longer have this pressure to heal them all. Some have closed, some are still there, the idea of ??health that they have sold us is that everything has to be cured, but it seems to me that there are wounds that are not going to heal and that I can take it from there. They are part of this person that I am. I am a survivor and now I want to enjoy having survived.

When did she give birth to herself?

He was 33 years old. He’s been 11. Until then he was living as a gay man and I never felt comfortable. Parenting myself meant doing a little justice for myself and recognizing my mom’s work. Re-gestating a cocoon, a womb, a lot of introspection. Being able to go out without shame. The first time I let my hair grow and changed my clothes was when I was 32. It was no longer listening to these voices that pointed or made fun. Don’t feel guilt. It was giving myself the chosen name, inhabiting a body.

What advice would you give to parents who have trans children?

Don’t spend too much time on trans pedagogy, on understanding what it is. Just don’t judge him. By being there and knowing how to accompany.