About
Catalina Torres
Birth year: 1993Gender: Trans woman
At first I thought shit, am I wrong, you know? And I have to adapt to what everyone else thinks, in other words normalcy. I have to let myself be crushed under the weight of normalcy. And then I realized that I was not the only person who was trans in the world, you know? And it was like "ok, this is for me."
Look, at school the first thing that happened to me was that I realized that I was different from the other children; that no, I didn't like the same things that they did, that I found them very basic, very stupid. And I avoided being around them. Instead I hung out with the girls, who I nevertheless thought were very basic because I grew up surrounded by adults, so my mentality was also different.
It was when my mom caught me, she beat the shit out of me, she scolded me. Later, when my grandmother came home from work, my mother told her to humiliate me, and my grandmother yelled at me. She basically took out the rosary and the Bible and told me I was going to hell. And at night, even later, when my father came home from work, he beat the shit out of me and when I started to cry, obviously because of the beatings and everything they had said to me before, he kept hitting me, saying “men don't cry, men don't cry.” So until I didn't cry anymore, he didn't let me go.
I closed the popup and put in the Google search engine "girls with penises," and there was all this information about what transvestites, drag queens, and transsexuals were. All with very old terms, but basically they were the first guidelines and the first orientation I had regarding what my gender identity could be, or what I would later know was my gender identity.
People, whether they’re cisgender or transgender, everyone has a stereotype in their heads that they want to reach. If you are a trans woman, you have a girl and a female body that you want to be as close to as possible. If you are a boy, you have a masculine or feminine prototype... whatever... that you want to reach and we have it both for ourselves and for the person we want to have next to us.
Today I work, I pay for my engineering studies, I still live with my parents [until November 2020], unfortunately, because my salary is not enough to rent and pay for the university. But I work, I pay for my things, I look out for my health, I look out for myself, except for the issue of housing.
