The trans influencer Eva Vildosola is honest in her first book: "I showered with a swimsuit so as not to see my body"

Eva is 20 years old but feels that she was really born just three months ago. The day she underwent her sex reassignment operation. The end point of a long road that began for her "officially" at the age of 14, when, being a "skinny and awkward" boy, she announced to those around her that she was a woman and wanted to see herself as such. "Since I was a child I felt that she had been born in the wrong body," she confesses to NIUS.

Known on social networks as @evacastt, this transsexual girl, born in Navarra, became known throughout the world after denouncing last year on Instagram a transphobic attack in Barcelona, ​​where she studies fashion. "Suddenly my face began to appear in all the newspapers and televisions, also outside of Spain, in Germany, Italy, even in Korea...", she relates. She received thousands of messages of support from all corners of the planet. "The only thing I wanted when I shared it on networks is for people to see that trans girls get hit just for being trans. I didn't measure the impact it could have. I thought my followers were going to see it and that's it, but I left I went to sleep and woke up with a million likes on the photo. I went from 15,000 to 200,000 followers in a few hours. It was hard for me to assimilate it, "he admits.

"Inadvertently" converted into a benchmark for LGTBI visibility, Eva has now decided to "open up" and tell her story in a book that she has titled My name is Eva. My struggle to be a woman (editorial Alienta) that has just arrived in bookstores. A real testimony through which we discover what it is like to grow up surrounded by prejudice.

She asks. The experiences you share in your book are hard. I imagine that capturing them on paper will have been difficult.

Response. The truth is that it has been a major emotional crush, because writing your own life is easy and difficult at the same time. Easy because it comes out on its own but complicated because you have to relive many things that you don't feel like.

The book is my whole life, I have opened myself up and I have told literally everything, even things that I had never shared with anyone, neither with my mother nor with my best friend.

Q. What is it that you had hidden until now?

R. The anguish that invaded me when I saw my genitals, I felt like a woman, but I had a penis, and just seeing it disgusted me. She hated it. I showered with a bathing suit and waited to dry myself in the air, without a towel, so as not to even touch it. Gender dysphoria is called this feeling.

Things as normal as going shopping with my mother became a real hell due to the tension that changing into a changing room generated in me. It took me half an hour to get undressed, keeping an eye on the curtain all the time, in case someone saw me passing by. It terrified me.

P. Did you always feel like this, since you were a child?

R. When I was little, I just wanted to put on a skirt, or put on makeup, or play with dolls, but things got bigger as I grew older. I remember when I was 11 years old or so, when at school the girls said that their chests hurt because they were growing and I didn't understand why it didn't hurt me. I always felt like a woman and it was a nightmare being inside a man's body, constantly pretending.

Q. Was going through school hard?

R. I lived many difficult episodes, they laughed at me because I was effeminate, they waited for me at the exit to chase me, they followed me, they harassed me...

Q. One of those attacks caused your suicide attempt

R. Yes, that day precisely they did not hit me. They followed me home insulting me but I managed to get away, but when my mother arrived I heard myself lying to her, telling her that she had done well at school, and I exploded. When she went out on an errand, I went into my room and tore up all my boyish clothes, then took all the pills I could find at home, paracetamol and ibuprofen, and left a goodbye note. He was 14 years old.

P. Accounts in the book that the police found you in poor condition...

A. Yes, my mother warned them and together they found me, I could hardly speak or move, I felt that it was the end, but it meant the beginning of everything because in the hospital where I was admitted to have my stomach pumped I spoke with a psychologist and I was honest. She was the one who told my parents.

Q. How did they react?

R. My mother was shocked. Imagine, they told him: "You don't have a son, you have a daughter." It was a jug of cold water, mainly because my mother had never heard the word trans. She didn't even know it existed, that we existed.

My father also came and made one that ended up getting kicked out of there, but hey, that's not surprising. We never get along. She didn't accept who I was and she never respected it. My parents were separated and I had to go to their house twice a month, but I felt that I was not welcome. There I heard for the first time "this boy is a fagot!" after my grandfather caught me doing the hair of a barbie. He must have been 5 or 6 years old. When I turned 14 I didn't come back and I haven't heard anything more about him. My father has never called me. He already six years ago ".

P. You have lived and suffered a lot to be so young

R. Yes, I have had to suffer for being different, for being a transgender person. That is what has pushed me to write this book, to help other girls who may be going through the same thing as me. So that they see that there is light beyond, that they are not alone, and that they can get out of the hole and be happy.

Q. It has cost you your whole life

R. Really yes, and since I started the process six years. Two of psychologists, because they have to diagnose if you really are trans, and four of treatment, blockers, hormones... they take forever, but in May they finally operated on me.

Q. More pain, although this time physical...

A. Yes, and on top of that, since I'm so impatient and I wanted everything in the same intervention, I had breast augmentation and vaginoplasty. The nurses told me I was brave. It was very hard, because with my chest I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move my arms and I couldn't eat or laugh... With the vagina I was sedated every day, with super strong antibiotics, I was like gone, I didn't even know my name. I couldn't urinate on my own. I spent a week with a catheter that I still remember the pain I had when it was removed. I was very bad for a month and then I got better little by little. I cried a lot, of pain, but also of happiness because I had already achieved it.

Q. I can't even think what the moment was like when you looked in the mirror and discovered Eva in her fullness

R.Uff, it was literally amazing. There it was, in the mirror, the one that had always been inside of me and now was also outside of me.

Q. What was the first thing you did?

R. Put on a bikini, cry like crazy and run for a swim. I haven't done it in six years and I've always loved swimming. During all that time I was afraid that when I got into the water my breast prostheses or the multiple panties I wore to hide my penis would move. It's hard to pretend you have a body you don't have. So the first day I got into the sea I regained peace, freedom, I said to myself, now, it's over, you've made it. It has been the best summer of my life.

Q. And now?

R. Now I want to focus on finishing fashion studies and creating a clothing brand that has no gender. Just as this book is the manual that I never had and always wanted to have, well now I am going to make the clothing brand that I never saw and always wanted to see.

P. A curiosity, why did you choose to call yourself Eva?

R. It was an impulse, that was the name of a youtuber I followed when I was 14 years old, when everything started, and I loved it because of the transformation she had experienced. Then I looked up the meaning of it: "the one who gives life" and I felt that I couldn't have chosen a better name. To me, of course, she has given it to me.