This story begins with the reflection of a child in the window of a train heading to Alicante in August, with its beach and its summer vacation. It ends with that same window returning the image of a woman and senior executive, boarding an AVE, on the way to an important meeting.
That of Eva Díaz, industrial engineer, specialist in strategic and technological consulting, and transgender woman, has been a very complex life journey. That which corresponds to the woman who is born in the body of a man. That’s why her train only has one destination: a truly world of equality, freedom and respect.
“At 8 years old, there was something strange about me. My name was Enrique, I had parents, a brother, I went to school… and until then everything was normal. But I had the feeling that there was another person inside me who, from time to time, wanted to go out and express himself,” explains Eva Díaz to journalist Joana Bonet in the series of 12 interviews Mujeres y Viajeras de Renfe.
A story behind which hides an internal battle “between what they told me I had to be and that woman inside me who was fighting to live. It is a very complex conflict. You have internal and external pressures that are very difficult to combine. And, in the end, it is the worst fight, because it is the fight against yourself that you have to maintain. I have cried a lot,” she adds.
Thus he lived, with a masculine appearance, until he could no longer bear it. It was in 2015, at the age of 52, when Eva Díaz decided to complete her gender transition process. She thus began a new way of being in the world because “if you call living going through life, she could have continued living like that. If you call living having intensity, dreams, passions, illusions, enjoying every day you wake up, then no. There came a time when it was: I transition or I die,” she confesses.
According to Eva, taking the definitive step also depends on the circumstances that surround you: “From the age of 48 or 49, my children were already relatively on track, pursuing their careers and, in some way, I had achieved many things in my life. “Maybe it was time to dedicate myself to myself, to take care of myself. The level of sadness you carry when you are not authentic is too great,” she says.
Putting a voice and a face to what she has experienced is so necessary for her that she has not stopped doing it when she has had the opportunity. “I have been fortunate to be able to convey my message to bring our society closer to a transition process that is there and that, in many cases, is very poorly understood, because we do not explain it,” she says.
Now, Eva Díaz sees before her a world full of many more possibilities and opportunities than when she was called Enrique. “A much broader, richer and more powerful world. More rewarding than it was for me before the transition.”
Of course, before that it had to go through a deconstruction process. “I had to know which part of my attitudes, reactions, thoughts, hopes and dreams was mine and which part was imposed on me. The ‘you have to’ that we get from being girls… I had to find what was mine and what, in some way, had stuck to my backpack. Culturally, socially, personally… Until I found the woman that she was. When you get to your essence, the freedom you have is brutal, because you stop caring what people think.”
He also assures that he does not feel any discrimination in his meat. “I am very visible, everyone knows my past, I don’t hide it anywhere. You go to my LinkedIn profile and sooner or later you catch it. And that means that whoever you interact with has it assumed, naturalized. In the past, at first, it was complicated. And I suffered triple discrimination: for being a woman, for being a transsexual, and for being an age. “I started looking for a job when I was 52,” she says.
He has always been very aware of his luck. Others have not had it “so easy”, very much in quotes, as she says. “I am privileged and my case is strange and I would tell you that it is easy, very in quotes. Doing this process in a professional position and in a geographical environment other than Madrid, the executive environment, is much more complex. “There are more reservations, biases and problems in accepting a series of things.”
Eva Díaz is the CEO of Appogeo Digital, a company that works to bring technology closer to sectors where it was not traditionally present and thus provide them with a differentiating element. “We never imagined a technical restaurant, for example. We are about to work with the Basque Culinary Center to introduce technology to restaurants. “We also work on technology for the well-being of the elderly and the disabled.”
But the engineer does not ignore that technology, in addition to leading us to freedom, also leads us to a crazier world. “And more dangerous, we are seeing all the cybersecurity attacks that are taking place. A world where we have a very great risk of losing our privacy, dominated by large technology companies that have much more power than any State, where our data and personal information and much of who we are can be within the reach of anyone,” he warns.
Throughout her many years of professional experience in management positions at giant consulting companies, Eva Díaz has experienced male and female leadership.
“There are all the differences. Male leadership is very executive, very based on position and hierarchy. Women have to earn that respect for our worth, we have to demonstrate it. It is slower leadership, but, once you have it, it is more powerful, because it is more cohesive with the organization, more about collaboration, conviction and values. Also more long term, where the teams generally tend to be very loyal,” she says.
Returning to personal territory, the woman who is Eva Díaz flees from “compartments”, from labels. “All these dogmatic and sectarian messages make me tired and bored when we are all looking for equality. Respect, freedom, ability to work and to be as we are, whatever we are. For me, feminism is achieving equality between men and women.”
Are we very far from that goal? “We are much closer than we were, but we are still far away. And not only that, but we are going backwards. We are adding to the wheel instead of helping, turning something that should be a fight for equality into a fight between genders. We are increasingly visible in politics, technology, in everything, and in some way we are occupying man’s comfort zone. I think that, until man finds his new position in this society, we will continue to have a very important problem.”
