Martina Giselle Ramirez - Happier as a Woman: Transforming Friendships, Transforming Lives

HAPPIER
AS A
WOMAN

HAPPIER
AS A
WOMAN

TRANSFORMING FRIENDSHIPS,
TRANSFORMING LIVES

MARTINA GISELLE RAMIREZ
&
ALICIA PARTNOY

Copyright 2019 by Matina Giselle Ramirez and Alicia Partnoy. All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

Printed in the United States.

Cover photos: Martina Giselle Ramirez, iStock

Cover design: Allyson Fields

Text design: Frank Wiedemann

First Edition.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-238-8

E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-239-5

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

Acknowledgments

W e would like to thank Loyola Marymount Universitys BCLA Faculty Research and Writing Grant and the Rains Research Assistant Funds Program for providing the support for this project, and Hannah Bennett and Mindy Waizer for their careful editing hands.Our deep gratitude goes to Juliana Zapata Acosta, Morgan Mostrom, Alejandra Loperena Molina, Marissa Cheng, Juliana Kodama, and Haley Smith, our amazing research assistants, who helped us transcribe and edit many hours of conversations and set up the scanner to produce high-quality pictures for the manuscript. Without them, this book would never have been finished on time.

To Mara Eva Rossi and Christine Jorgensen.

Your courage inspires us.

The world misses your presence.

Weaving Solidarities

Alicia Portnoy

Alicia and Martina signing the book contract with Cleis Press, with Martinas former student Stephanie Kawecki as witness, September 2016

W elcome to our lives and our struggles, dear reader. In these pages Dr. Martina Ramirez, a transgender professor of biology, will share her journey from her childhood in a poor and conservative Mexican American family to her current life as, finally, a happy woman. Through personal accounts, photos, reflections, testimonies, and hours of conversations, you will learn about her experiences as a Latina enduring multilayered discrimination but finding the strength to survive and work for social justice. As an ally in her journey, I lend my hand and heart to weave this tapestry of solidarity which aims to inspire those who struggle for the world to accept, understand, and embrace their real gender identity. Ours is a labor of education, an effort to open eyes and minds, to fight against hatred and indifference.

Let me tell you about the seeds of our friendship and this book. In 2014, after Martina helped me translate a spider-related word in one of my short stories into English, I half-jokingly wrote in an email to her that we should coteach a class on Spiders in/and Literature. Her enthusiastic response came right back, and soon after we were at work on the class proposal. It was approved. That fall semester we met our thirty-nine students. There was some shifting in the registration records when a few of them dropped the course after meeting the Spider Lab queen tarantula named Fluffy, whom Martina brought to the first day of class to welcome the freshly minted college students. The semester was intense, at times stressful, at times exhilarating, but it made clear to me that collaborating with Martina was a seamless process.

Two years later, in April 2016, I was invited to give a TEDx Youth Talk in San Diego. There, I met Dr. Eli Green. His talk, A Toolkit for Becoming a Transgender Ally, inspired me to ask Martina if she wanted to write a book together.

Im game, she smiled with excitement. Lately people have been telling me that my life is very interesting: a transgender Latina, adopted as a baby, raised in a poor family, someone who attended college and got a doctoral. They ask me to write a book, but I dont have the time.

She did, however, make time to sit for hours of recorded talks, to sift through memories and photographs, and even to build a mysterious (to me) device powerful enough to digitize her childhood color slides. Through that experience we became friends, and I have had the privilege of accompanying her on the recent steps of her journey, including her gender-confirming surgery in December 2016.

While I was weaving solidarities with Martina Ramirez, our lives felt connected in uncanny ways. I still remember her beaming selfie on Facebook. She was holding an index card with the date for her surgery:

Martinas Facebook photo announcing the date of her gender-confirming surgery, June 2016

December 22, 2016. Underneath, she had written, So it will be a very special Xmas, before coming home on Jan 1, 2017 as a very happy woman .

I had also gained my freedom around that time of the year, I added to the more than one hundred post likes and well-wishing messages. Later, in my office crowded with books about my own life as a former political prisoner in Argentina, I told her that on December 22, back in 1979, I had arrived in the US as a refugee.

My story was, I believe, the fifth book published by Cleis Press, the same company that puts this book in your hands today. Back in 1986, Cleis, the brainchild of Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, was one of two feminist presses in the United States. The visionary couple conceived this womens press with a strong focus on lesbian writings. In a wonderful act of solidarity, while their publishing house grew to issue over five hundred LGBTQ+ titles, they kept my book, The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, alive for almost forty years. In the meantime, justice has been achieved in Argentina, where my vignettes about life in a concentration camp were finally published in 2006. The book was used as evidence in the trials against the genocide perpetrators. People realized that we, the victims and survivors, were not terrorist monsters as the dictatorship had claimed; we had been fighting for social justice.

Martina has also undertaken a labor of education for social justice. Through her teaching, mentoring, courageous transition, and telling of her own experience, she seeks to inspire young people to follow their dreams, to be true to themselves and, she says, to learn that we are not monsters. She reminds us that sometimes what the media reports about transgender celebrities is not helpful. See, most of us are just regular people.

Martinas journey and her life story need to be told today. If you look at people who are transgender and you look at the statistics, you realize the numbers of us who drift into depression and into suicide is pretty high, she said. I knew by 2010 that if I did not do something, I was going to find myself drifting down hill, and I did not want to go there.

Martinas journey aims to give hope to the many marginalized people who struggle for recognition of their gender identity. Being this way, as I am now, is so much like coming home, Martina tells the world. She finds joy in the opportunity to help others be happier.