Cuba's Transsexuals Get Powerful New
Friend
by Andrea Rodriguez
The Asssociated Press
Posted: September 5,
2004 4:31 pm ET |
(Havana) In the four years since she began
her transformation, life hadn't
been too difficult for Gillian. But this summer, she says, she was detained
twice by police who threatened her with prison for the crime of ``peligrosidad''
- dangerousness.
Her ``dangerousness,'' apparently, is her dress and makeup.
Cuban transsexuals say police have come to their homes lately to warn them
to dress ``in a corresponding manner.'' Gillian, 19, says she is afraid to go
outdoors dressed as a woman.
But help is on the way.
Mariela Castro Espin, an internationally renowned sexologist who happens to
be the niece of President Fidel Castro, wants Cuba's National Revolutionary
Police to undergo gender-sensitivity training.
``The police take measures - that's what they are there for
- but they
interpret things with their own way of thinking,'' she said in an interview.
``They have learned over their lifetimes that transsexuals and homosexuals
are intrinsically bad.''
Indeed, for decades, that was the general attitude toward anything
non-heterosexual in communist Cuba. Homosexuality was derided as
an illness of the capitalist past, and in the late 1960s some artists were sent
to labor camps simply for being gay.
But with the limited economic and social liberalization of the mid-1990s came
a new wave of tolerance, highlighted by the hit movie Strawberry and Chocolate,
about the friendship between a naive young Communist and a highly educated gay Cuban who is in love with his country but at odds with his
government.
Alarmed by the recent complaints, Espin is working with the Interior
Ministry, which oversees the police, to hold a seminar about gender this month.
``The idea is to explain sexuality and its distinct expressions,'' she said.
She hopes to help police understand ``that these people should not be excluded
from society.''
The Health Ministry's National Center for Sex Education, which she directs,
is already running a pilot program at the Dragones police station in Central
Havana with ``positive'' results, said Castro.
Other than numbers to report emergencies, the force is not listed in
telephone directories, and has no known spokesperson who might comment.
Castro's center has been busy for years organizing support groups and safe
sex seminars for transvestites and transsexuals.
Through vigorous research, the center has identified 23 people in Cuba as
transsexuals and another 62 cases are under study, Castro said.
Due to a lack of expertise in the area, no sex change operations have been
performed in Cuba. But those ruled officially to be transsexuals receive free psychological
counseling and hormonal treatments and can even change their name and gender on
ID papers.
That's not the case for for non designated
transsexuals or transpeople who do not want to go through a full transformation such as Gillian, who was born and is
still listed on official documents as Leinier Diaz. She hasn't assumed a false
surname, but feels ``Gillian'' better expresses who she is.
Gillian said many police wrongly assume all trans
people are prostitutes, or
simply people whose lifestyles are ``incompatible with socialist morals.''
Still living at home with her grandmother, she hopes to sign up this fall for
a government program that trains young people without a trade or university
degree to become student teachers and social workers.
Carla, a 19-year-old trans woman who wears a miniskirt to her job at the sex
education center, said she dreams of a world where she can be herself. She
declined to reveal her full legal name.
The ideal society, said Carla, would ``see the best of me as a person,
without caring whether I dress as a woman or a man.''
©Associated Press 2004
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