Valeria Paola Flores arrived in Spain not long ago, on March 2, 2020. Here I had nothing or anyone, no help, I didn't know where to go or how to move. "I felt like I was in a garden with a candle, with someone telling me to look for your life, solve your problems yourself," she recalls when we spoke with her on the occasion of the meeting 'The path to the labor inclusion of trans people', held by Redi in collaboration with the Embassy of the Netherlands. And his problems were not few.
Valeria was born in Honduras in the wrong body; He knew it almost since he had the use of reason, with five years he felt different. He didn't like to go with children or the football or games that everyone expected; She did not see herself reflected in her brothers, but in her sisters, she believed herself to be one more. "My mother put on makeup every day to go to work in a mirror in front of my room. I would look at her and think, 'I want to be like her.' He was my reference, he always has been," he says.
He began his process of change at the age of 15 and already at school he began to suffer the consequences. "My professor of Natural Sciences forced me to leave class, there was a group of classmates who kept annoying me and making me bullied. I didn't want to go to school, for me it was a horror movie, it was constant suffering." There his education was truncated. Later, to make a living, he studied hairdressing.
Knowing herself a woman in a man's body also forced her to leave everything, her country, her family, her friends..., her life. "They were going to kill me, like all those who had held my position before me." From the age of 23 to 29, Valeria Paola was an LGBTI activist and coordinator of LGBT Arcoíris de Honduras, a non-profit organization to make trans women visible, a group she once led. "Our life there is very difficult. You get up, thank God for one more day of life and think about whether you can go home that night, it's a constant fear. And if you are lucky enough to return, you are also grateful for it. It is a macho society that does not accept different people. The challenge of your life is to live. Every day they murder a trans woman in the world."
This is what happened to her colleagues in office, one after another they were killed. "When I picked up the baton, at 26, I knew she was sentenced, that she was next. They tried to kill me three times. 'You have to go,' my friends and family told me. But I refused, I preferred to die to defend our rights, I had my life there. One day I was tricked to the airport. There were my mother and brothers waiting for me with my suitcase and plane ticket. 'I'd rather see you on a screen, not on a grave,' my mother told me. It was very hard to separate from them."
It wasn't easy to land here either. "I was in shock. I connected my phone to the wifi and started looking for a foster home on Google." He called the first one that appeared on the list, because in Honduras he had been told that it would be the best. And that was Mission Emmanuel, in Tres Cantos, an organization that is responsible for helping especially migrants from Africa. Valeria suddenly went on to live with almost a dozen black men with Muslim beliefs. "The rejection on their part was total, for them a trans woman was unacceptable. But I didn't care; In my country I had been through much worse." In addition, it was something temporary, her goal was to reach Germany, where someone was waiting for her to make everything easier.
But the pandemic crossed his path. "They locked us up. And they faded to my dreams of activism, I didn't have any support. When you are in South America you see Europe as a paradise of joy and freedom. But the reality is different. Here you suffer triple discrimination. First, because she is trans; second, because you are Latina and, third, because you don't have documentation, without it you don't have the right to anything, you are a person who doesn't exist."
And life is getting harder and harder. "But you know what to do with that kind of struggle, because you've lived it before," he says. According to the latest UGT data, 40% of trans women in our country admit to having been rejected because of their gender identity and 30% are afraid, but not of discrimination, but of physical fear that something will happen to them. They are not disoriented: 2% admit to having been victims of sexual violence in their workplace.
Finding employment is the biggest challenge facing the trans community in Spain. According to data from the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), 42% of trans people living here say they have felt discriminated against during their job search processes or in their work environment. "We have changed, but the prejudices are still many. This group suffers an unemployment rate of more than 60%. And two-thirds of those who find work are afraid to reveal who they are, for fear of retaliation. They do not know the protocols of the companies, the forms of accompaniment of these to avoid this rejection; They don't speak out of fear and that isolates them more. They are separated from the rest, which causes greater discrimination, is a group in a situation of socio-labor risk, "says Alba Herrero, vice president of Redi and HR director for southern Europe and Francophone Africa of SAP.
"80% of trans people are out of work, a situation that lasts an average of 3.5 years," says Bernarda Martínez, senior consultant at Llyc, "they ask for understanding and to be given a chance. When a hiring manager tells them he doesn't care about their sexual condition, he's telling them just that, that they don't matter. It's not the answer."
But it is the one that Valeria Paola has had more times than she can remember, in her countless job interviews. "They tell you, 'Great, you're the people we're looking for. We're going to call you.' And that call never comes. What does come is disillusionment. And exhaustion, you get weaker. They don't evaluate me for my degree or my abilities, so I prepared. They do it just because of my appearance, because of my gender identity. How bad is it to be myself? It forces you to get up in the morning and say to life, 'I can.' But it's getting harder and harder and you get desperate, you have to look for a living, because you need to find work and have a salary, you don't live off air."
Javier Barbancho
In this search for a living, a good part of trans women end up in the clutches of prostitution, especially migrants who do not have proper documentation. "Working is not a job opportunity, it's a life opportunity: if you don't have a job you don't have a life, because you can't pay the rent. You feel obliged to do something you don't want, you face sex work to be able to support yourself," says Valeria Paola. She never made it into that world, but she does know what it's like to work in black. "There is no document that stipulates the hours or what they are going to pay you. You accept everything and the abuse is constant."
When everything began to return to normal after the pandemic and before having her papers in order, Valeria Paola got a job in a portal cleaning company. Later, he combined it with cleaning floors; Half day at each site. "They didn't pay me the hours I did, but I couldn't complain, I would come home with whatever it was, the boss would give me what he thought I had done. They made me buy even the cleaning products and left the dirtiest floors. You think it's something typical of that company, but no, then you face another one that treats you the same. As much as I struggled, I only received constant doors in my face. I needed money and went from hostel to hostel."
Valeria Paola during the meeting ''The road to the labor inclusion of trans people', organized by Redi in collaboration with the Embassy of the Netherlands.
Finding a home is another of the great discriminations faced by this group. "That ordeal never ends," says Valeria Paola. "The search for employment and housing go together, the rejection is total in both cases. At first they say yes, but when you go to see the house and they know who wants to rent it, they change their mind. 'It's already rented', 'let me think about it'... They dare not tell you the truth, but they never call you again. Even when you have rented it, the landlord appears telling you that you must leave. You face being on the street, and not because you don't have the money, but simply because you're trans. 'I don't want to have a faggot in my house, what are my neighbors going to think'... That is the real reason. For me it was enough to have a place to go to sleep after work. The fame that trans women have is that we are sex workers, people imagine that we are going to set up a '' in the house and that we are going to destroy it."
Her life began to change when she came across the Red Cross, where they gave her psychological support and accompanied her in the asylum application until she got her residency. "When I had the papers I started working in a hairdresser in Tres Cantos, at least I had a contract. I stayed six months and it was very difficult, because my official schedule was from nine in the morning to six in the afternoon, but they forced me to arrive at eight and leave at nine or ten at night. I was constantly told that I was clumsy and dumb. It's the same thing society tells you just for being trans. That kills you, but you have to put up with rejection, abuse."
She was fired, without settlement or compensation. "The lack of information is a double-edged sword. I went through a stage in which I could not take it anymore, I even thought about returning to my country; Here I had no one to tell that I could not even eat. On one occasion I was kicked out of a bakery for asking them to give me a loaf of bread. Where is humanity? I only received contempt."
Javier Barbancho
In Spain, trans people who do not have residency are not eligible for the official name change. "We have an ID where the one that our parents gave us in their day appears. When you present your resume and they ask you for the documentation..., the rejection is total. It's happened to me many times."
She is now at a stage in her life where she feels "calm, not happy, because I can afford my house, my transportation and my food." He has been working for nine months at the April Group, France's wholesale insurance broker. "I had never been in a company like this in my life, nor could I even imagine it. I am with many people from different countries, cultures and gender orientations. It fills me with satisfaction and hope to know that, like me, another trans woman can arrive at her workplace in the morning and that her colleagues receive her with a 'good morning', without being guided by appearance. I feel comfortable, included and respected. In other places it was not like that, I have always had to work an hour more, put more desire than the rest, endure the screams and live with the constant fear that the boss will attack me because I have not done the work as he wants it to be done. We are different people and we think differently."
He arrived in April by chance. She needed help and learned they were filming a documentary about trans women. "I wrote to them on Instagram: 'I'm in Spain, I don't have a job to eat, or how to get around. I have nothing. Do you know someone who can help me?' That's where my normal life started. I found the support I needed, a family." It was then that he met the ambassador of the Netherlands and had the backing of an embassy. "You come from the bottom and suddenly you're sitting at a very posh table, with a small plate and a lot of forks. I was very nervous, I was just thinking about how to use the knife or fork, not to stain the tablecloth. At that table there were also people from April. 'I would like you to give me a chance, I want to work in your company, if you teach me, I learn,' I told them." And his life changed.
He does not plan to return to Honduras. "I no longer love my country, they took away my job, my life. Do you think I want to go back to that place where everything was taken from me and trampled on me? To this day I never thought I would say this." His plans are to return to study, and "spend a lot of time in this company, because I am very well, at ease."
Valeria Paola's final message is one of hope: "Whoever is going to work is a human being, not my sexual or gender identity. It doesn't depend on how I dress or how I walk. I only ask to be tested. If every company hired a trans person, the problem would end. We are very few."
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