She danced naked and showed her body as it is: “We are women with a penis, there is nothing to change”

Valeria Licciardi did high school in the late 1990s. Back then, school textbooks and typical pictures of the human body showed only two possibilities: the body of the woman, the body of the man, the end. His - “we have a penis and two eggs, I say so, lovingly, because it is still loud when one speaks of these things” - was not represented in the classrooms. Decades passed since that absence, and yet little of that changed.

Valeria is now 37 years old and has several items on her resume. It is “former Big Brother 2015″, something he didn't want to be but he doesn't deny, on the contrary: it was the way he found to show an ordinary trans girl - neither glamorous nor capocomic - interacting with heterosexual, white and cisgender men (the opposite of transgender, for example, having a penis and identifying himself male).

That's how she later made room for what she did want to do, which was to work as a journalist, actress, dancer. It was, in fact, in this last facet that she danced naked in several prestigious stages, for example, the Teatro San Martín. “What for?” , is something that Valeria replied in a note at the time: “So you can see that women with penises also exist.”

In this interview with Infobae Valeria she goes through the subject and goes through it: what she felt in childhood and adolescence when she looked at her body in the mirror and how important it was that no love told her “I love you, but I love you with a vagina”. He tells why he chose to show his body as it is and the reason why he created a brand of underwear for trans women's bodies and transvestites “as they are, without fantasies”.

Me in front of the mirror

“I belong to a generation in which, what we could see as a representation of trans people in the media, was Cris Miró or Flor de la V. The discourse that resonated at that time was 'I was born in the wrong body', and a little bit that repeated that, although without knowing what it meant”, he desanda.

“But at the same time, something made me realize that it wasn't that I was dissatisfied with my body but that society had problems with my body. I stood in front of the mirror and didn't hate my genitals.”

It didn't happen to him, as some other transvestites and trans tell, this thing of looking for scissors and wanting to erase the genitals that a girl or girl was not supposed to have. “I didn't feel hate but I did feel discomfort, in the sense that I didn't know if what I had there corresponded to me. At some point I did feel that having surgery and having a vagina could insert me into society, but that lasted very short”, he continues.

It did not last long and the sexual reassignment surgery called vaginoplasty was not done - he believes - for two reasons: having always been accompanied by his family “and because at the time of sexual awakening I was with a person who accepted my genitality as it was. I was fortunate, that gave me security, and it seems fundamental to me, because in that sexual awakening you can cross paths with someone who hurts your psyche, someone who says 'I love you, but I love you with a vagina'”.

And he adds: “It has happened to me from meeting a boy, not long ago, and that he said to me 'what I like about you is that I can walk with you on the street, you are a girl but in intimacy I know you have a penis'. I understand he meant it as a compliment, but that's actually super violent.”

Her family accompanied her as they could: without the Internet where she could find other stories to identify with, with love and dialogue, listening to what was happening to Valeria. Also with great fear: how could he, with these differences, enter this world, build a life, avoid prejudice?

“Not only was there no Internet, but the books that existed were very biological. They immediately talked about sex reassignment surgery as a solution to the problem. I think that's the crux of the matter: my parents never saw it as a problem.”

In school, however, trans bodies did not exist either in books, or on blackboards, or on pictures. “No, not even with sticks, our ESI was Marimar,” he laughs. It's a joke but those were the TV shows of the time, the same time when the “women's” wipe companies went to schools and separated the girls to tell them - and sell them - what was going to happen only to them: trans males - who also menstruate - did not exist in those brotherhoods.

Despite the fact that the Comprehensive Sexual Education Act (ESI) has existed in Argentina for 15 years, classes began again and the visibility of transvestite trans bodies remains a debt in the classroom.

She explains it to Infobae Gabriela Mansilla, Luana's mother, the first trans girl in the country to be able to change her name and gender on her DNI, at the age of 6. Luana is already a teenager, a trans teenager who decided to leave her body as it is, that is, not to undergo hormonal treatments to block male pubertal development.

“Nothing changed. There is no book in school that makes transvestite and trans bodies visible. And ESI has not yet been updated with this topic. I have seen that in the last update, in 2019, in adolescence they name trans identity and Lohana Berkins (a reference for the transvestite collective), but the bodies are not there. Menstruation continues to be attributed only to cis women, like pregnancy.”

To cover that hole this year Gabriela published a book called “A World Where Everyone Fits: ESI with a Transvestite Transvestite Perspective” (Chirimbote publishing house). In the illustrations are the bodies of trans men with vulva, vagina, uterus, ability to gestate and the scars of mastectomies (those who decide to remove their breasts have them). There are also the bodies of transvestite and trans femininity: girls, adolescents and adults with penises, testicles and the ability to fertilize, sometimes with breast implants, sometimes not.

Esconder, ¿esconder?

The difficulty of recognizing transvestite and trans bodies as they are meant that many have felt, or still feel, the need to hide their genitals to fit into a stereotype, even if it causes pain or hurt.

“If you think about it, you don't see transvestite and trans bodies in school textbooks, on sex education prints, in hospitals, or on beaches in bathing suits. When bodies are not visible, we think that they do not exist or that they are wrong”, explains Valeria. That's why, in 2018, he created Naná, a brand of bombachas (sometimes they call them thongs or tricksters) designed for those bodies.

The idea was born after Valeria was summoned to do a dance performance that required her to spread her legs. “I needed a panty that, when I lifted my leg a little more, I didn't miss anything, the same thing when I wore some skirts. What I sought was a solution, not a fantasy. It is a panty that doesn't come to hide anything, nor does it say 'wearing this garment you're going to be a woman' or 'you're going to be more woman'”, she explains.

She continues: “It is a panty designed for transvestites and trans who accept their bodies and need a special piece of underwear to take care of and protect something that came with us,” she says. “We have a penis and we have two eggs, I say it as well as half loving because it is still strong when you talk about these things.”

For one of Naná's campaigns, Valeria made a t-shirt in which they didn't show a transvestite or trans body but made two tits, a penis and two testicles with fruits, a way of saying 'yes, this is down here, let's stop giving it so much weight'. We are women with a penis, there is nothing to change, giving so much value to genitality is the most absurd thing there is.”

Behind some of these decisions, Valeria had a political position. And it was noticed when she accepted director Leticia Manzur's proposal to be part of a play called “Los huesos”, which lasted 3 years and for which she accepted to dance completely naked at the San Martín theater, in the Rojas, at the Recoleta Cultural Center, among others.

“I thought it was a wonderful idea. In the theater our bodies were always sexualized, they were always seen as phenomena. Here it just appeared as just another body and it seemed revolutionary to me. Without saying anything, we were telling the public 'these bodies exist'. In some functions some people have stopped and retired, we never knew why. Or yes: it was a play that was uncomfortable for some people,” she says, who is now rehearsing for a series that will soon be released on Netflix.

Of course, each person can (or should be able) to do with their body whatever they want - to have surgery or not, to do hormonal treatments or not - the interesting thing is that they do not feel it an obligation.

“For me it was important to make our bodies visible so that we can be freer, so that new generations can choose and not feel that someone imposes on them what they should be like so that society accepts them,” he closes.

He knows that there are still debts - for example, going through ESI to include their bodies - but other things are already changing.

“The new generations no longer want to be equal to the rest, like when I was a girl,” she says. That is why they seek information beyond textbooks and raise the flag of difference. “Now I see a lot of trans girls and transvestites on Tik Tok who show themselves in a way that I have never seen before. They say 'I have a dick, what's bothering you? ' They flaunt their bodies as they are, they talk about them with pride, that seems beautiful to me.”

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