Valentina Berr In 2018, she became the second trans female soccer player in Spain. At the age of 29, the Europa player leaves him fed up with the structural violence that had led to continuous anxiety attacks.
He says he doesn’t hang up his boots, they hang them up. Why?
When institutions, the media and a (small but very noisy) part of the population exercise structural violence against trans women to the point of suffocating us and destroying our mental and physical health, the fact of retiring is not a decision that I can consider my own.
He had gotten into panic attacks before and after games. At what point did he say enough?
In January of this year I had already made the decision that this would be the last season, and so I informed my coach, precisely because it was being an idyllic season in sports and even then I did not feel well. Unfortunately I couldn’t even make it to the end of the season as I had to step away from team dynamics with two games left. I said enough because we had won the league and instead of taking a weight off my shoulders, those anxiety attacks were increasing. Since that game, the one that meant winning the title at the beginning of April, I haven’t trained again.
In an article they even told him that he was a man who dressed up to abuse girls.
It was one more blow, like so many others that I have publicly denounced.
It denounces structural violence. What situations have you encountered in these four years?
These four years have been a mixture of very good moments in which I have really enjoyed something that I like to do and an accumulation of pressure and violence that I have tried to endure alone to try to protect my environment, although everything has ended up coming out. On the one hand, the fact of being permanently suspicious for the institutions, in the sense of being forced to comply with a limit of testosterone levels that many colleagues who are not trans can exceed long without, in principle, anyone pointing them out, to Unless, due to her appearance or physical conditions, she is believed to be a trans woman without being one. On the other hand, there are hundreds of messages on networks insulting and humiliating me. Or having to hide from my family those barbarities that we talked about in the press.
How has your experience in women’s sports been since you began your journey?
It has been an experience full of contrasts. Both on a purely sporting level, as well as in relation to my condition. Competitive sport is already like that, it’s not all joy. However, despite the fact that my teammates and rivals have always treated me as one more person within the enormous diversity in which we live in women’s football, the reality is that I have always been a bit on my guard, for fear of that for being a trans woman I could receive aggressions within football like the ones I have suffered outside. Luckily it was not like that, no teammate or rival has ever done it, quite the opposite. But that did not prevent me from condemning myself to a certain ostracism for prevention. I have lost precious experiences with them that I hope one day I can somehow recover, because I have come across wonderful people.
He claimed to always feel under suspicion. Is it something that happens to you in sports more or less than in the rest?
Sport amplifies that feeling, which is not so much a feeling but a reality. In other areas it also happens, of course, and not only because of being trans, but because of being a lesbian. Let us remember that today, if a couple of women have a child through assisted reproduction methods and want to register their child in the registry, they are often forced to marry, or to adopt it, in the case of the non-pregnant mother . As if they suspect that the two of them are not really the mothers. That does not happen with heterosexual couples (at least, those with papers).
In his goodbye, he affirms that women’s football is more open than men’s. Do you think that more teams should follow the example of Europa and position themselves against intolerance?
The public position against discrimination is important, on the part of any actor that forms part of society and of sport in particular. However, if this is not accompanied by internal club policies and federative protocols that protect and promote our right to be part of the sport in a healthy and welcoming way, there will not be a substantial change either. The club’s support for me is very important on an individual level and it is also a very beneficial message for society, but at the same time it will not solve any of the violence that has made me leave.
The Government has approved theley trans‘ while several sports federations begin to block the presence of transsexuals in international women’s competitions. What criteria would you apply so that they could compete?
I think the mistake in most approaches to trans athletes is the approach itself. If they should participate or not, if they adulterate the competition, if there will be men who pretend to be women,… It is a mistake because it is the agenda that those who hate women want to set, and they get us to talk about it and not seems as absurd as it is. We all go through better and worse physical abilities, which depend on thousands of factors that go beyond our chromosomes. For example, when I was little I developed a scoliosis of 18 degrees of deviation, my back is like a C, and every two or three times I’m injured, I don’t directly know what it’s like to play without pain, not to mention the fear of colliding, of falling, … In any shot I run out of football. Then, if we really wanted a more fair and equal competitive sport, what we would have to do is put an end to the capitalist system, because that does cause a great disadvantage that affects many people. But curiously, no one finds it a disadvantage that someone has to go to training shattered after 10 hours washing dishes or answering calls in a ‘call center’, while another colleague has dedicated her morning to choosing her next Louis Vuitton and eating toast with avocado and aromatic spices imported from the southern Caribbean. Therefore, if something should concern us about trans women in sports, it is, for example; why are there so few? Why don’t we get to the elite? How do we break that glass ceiling? Nobody talks about that.
She says that there are few trans women who play sports and fewer in federated sports. How would she foster it?
First, it should be studied why women do not practice sports and what prevents them from doing so at the federated level. What are your barriers to entry. Perhaps they are normative, or perhaps it is simply that no one has bothered to convey the importance of sport in the health of trans women. It is necessary to know why they are not in sport in order to be able to design public policies that encourage their participation. And then, it should stop spreading and amplifying hate speech against trans women, as well as hoaxes like the one spread about the swimmer Lia Thomaswhich the journalist Noemí López Trujillo denounced, which only contribute to creating a more hostile environment and, consequently, deter us from practicing sports.
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In 2018 she became the second transsexual footballer in Spanish women’s football, what advice would you give to those who want to follow her path?
Well, I just left the sport, so I sell tips that I don’t have (laughs). But in any case, I would tell them that no one deceives them, that sport also belongs to the dissidents, that women’s soccer is built by us, the deviants, the dykes, the tomboys, the trans. We are not intruders; we are women’s sport. Oh, and above all: that they take care of themselves, and find those people they can trust and let themselves be taken care of. Alone we can’t. And we are not alone.