Valentina Berr is a writer, educator, and transfeminist activist whose work focuses on questioning normative assumptions about gender, identity, and the body. In her book The Answer to Everything You Would Ask a Trans Girl (2023), Valentina invites readers to reflect on the fluidity of identity, the complexity of femininity, and the challenges that trans people face in contemporary society, combining rigor, tenderness, and humor to make complex topics such as dysphoria, non-binarity, and transfeminist violence accessible. Her approach goes beyond individual experience, exploring how culture, politics, and social environments shape the ways we exist and relate to gender, always from a critical and liberating perspective.
Valentina shares her transition journey and the obstacles she has encountered, from her relationship with her family to confronting social and media-driven transphobia, proposing a way of living identity that celebrates plurality, self-definition, and resilience. Furthermore, her perspective encompasses both personal intimacy and collective issues, building bridges between individual experiences and broader social struggles, becoming a key voice for understanding the richness and complexity of being trans in contemporary Spain and beyond. Her work and reflections inspire questioning the norm, opening up space for questions instead of imposed answers, and recognizing the beauty of diversity in all its forms.
Monika: Hello Valentina. I’ve just finished reading your book, “La respuesta a todo lo que le preguntarías a una tía trans” (2024), and I have to say, it completely blew me away. Congratulations on such a powerful work! I’m thrilled to have the chance to talk with you today about your book and the ideas you explore in it.
Valentina: I’m also excited about this conversation; it makes me very happy to be able to be part of this valuable space of trans archive and memory that you are creating. I really appreciate it.
Monika: I want to start with identity. I was assigned male at birth, but I’ve always felt like a woman. After my hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery, my body finally matches who I am, I’m a woman. In your book, you say that back in 2019 you really identified with the category of “woman,” but as you were writing, you started loosening that attachment. You describe identity as fluid, collective, shaped by culture, politics, and generations. So even though we both share a transgender experience, do you think our understanding of it changes depending on the communities and environments we grow up in?
Valentina: I really appreciate the tenderness with which you’ve asked this very interesting and complex question. The truth is that this tension between your way and my way of experiencing being trans exists even within myself. There is an entire social framework that reminds us every day that all of us, both trans and cis, must adjust our bodies to what is considered a ‘real woman.’ A lie that, said so many times, becomes a violent truth accompanied by fierce scrutiny. Amid so much hostility, it’s understandable that we sometimes find refuge in bodily norms, in appearing or feeling ‘normal.’
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| Available via Amazon. |
Valentina: Once you have inhabited a visibly trans body, your way of understanding the world changes forever. You learn to read looks, suspicion as a prelude to something worse, violence, the subtext of everything around you. It’s exhausting. It’s curious that in such a patriarchal world, the days I feel safest in public are the days my appearance fits more closely with that of a cis woman. This says a lot about how difficult it can be to resist fitting into the gender binary. But there is also an euphoric part to that decision, which I think goes even beyond identity.
Monika: What role do relationships and friendships with other non-normative people play in your well-being and sense of freedom?
Valentina: I don’t ‘feel’ nonbinary; I choose to live in non-binarity because it’s my way of telling those around me that, behind all this violence, a very free and beautiful part of existence is being hidden from us. In terms of identity, I no longer know what my gender is: I know I am not a man, I don’t know if I am a woman, and that indefinition is what makes me feel, some days more than others, that I owe no one gender coherence. But to live like this, at least in my case, it’s essential to be surrounded by other people who exist in the same way. For me, for example, being around non-normative lesbians has saved my life.
Monika: Are you concerned that talking about identity as flexible might make us seem like Pokémon, constantly evolving and leveling up in unexpected ways?
Valentina: Identity, and I’m not just talking about gender, is flexible! Imagine if we all had the same identity we had in high school. Let’s ask ourselves if the people from our high school are identically the same now. The goth girl from my school is now doing a master’s in digital marketing and listens to Bad Bunny, and that’s very human. Identity is precisely about that: the way we understand ourselves and make ourselves understood by our surroundings, about fitting in and projecting ourselves to the world. It’s a language that connects us inward and outward.
Monika: Do you think history and culture influence how we live our gender day by day?
Valentina: When we talk about gender, I think the problem is the historical weight it carries in society, especially, but not only, in capitalist, colonized societies with a strong influence from major religious institutions. But the reality is that we all experience gender and its roles in incoherence, and normally those who are coherent are so because they’ve learned to be, not because it comes naturally.
Monika: What happens when cis people participate in conversations about gender dysphoria and transfeminism?
Valentina: It’s incredible how many people who are not trans attend my talks about the book thinking they’re going to hear a story about being trans as if it were something completely foreign to them, and they end up questioning their own way of experiencing gender. It’s hilarious and, at the same time, harsh, to talk about gender dysphoria with cis people because they quickly realize that everyone feels some significant discomfort with their body in relation to their gender. If we could build a transfeminist society where everything could be more flexible, just as you suggested in the question, we would be happier, feel better about ourselves, and, therefore, spend much less money on surgeries, creams, and treatments to adjust our bodies to ‘what it’s supposed to be.’ This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t modify our bodies, something I am completely in favor of. Transfeminism aims to dismantle imposition and convince us that there is no ‘correct way to be.
Monika: So how do you define femininity? Where does it begin, and is there a point where it ends, or does it even have an end?
Valentina: Femininity is a denigrated language. Understanding it as a set of codes that we have constructed to understand ourselves collectively, the patriarchal power relations that serve the capitalist production system have relegated femininity to an inferior position. At the same time, the gender binary has drawn a boundary between those subjects who are denied access to femininity and those who are obliged to perform it, allowing a very limited transition from one to the other, always under strict rules that scrutinize us.
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| Valentina Berr at CCCB © CCCB, 2023. Photo by Alice Brazzit. |
Monika: Do you think your personal experience as a non-binary lesbian affects the way you live and perceive femininity?
Valentina: I don’t know if femininity in itself holds anything that attracts me or not; it’s all contextual for me. As a nonbinary lesbian, my context in relation to femininity is particular, even conflictive. I remember that recently, on Catalan public television, they put on so much makeup that, when I saw myself, I even felt a kind of gender dysphoria, as if looking so close to what a cisgender woman is supposed to look also made me feel uncomfortable. That’s why I say it’s all contextual. I recommend reading Noemí López Trujillo, the work of Juana Dolores, and the ballroom encounters of Jayce Bodega, who explore femininity from perspectives far more interesting than anything I could say.
Monika: I love your idea of “trans lightbulbs”, those small moments that make us realize gender might not fit neatly into boxes. You mentioned examples like the anime Ranma ½, where the protagonist changes gender when splashed with water, which clearly resonated with many trans viewers. Would you say these “lightbulbs” don’t define identity themselves, but rather reveal the cracks in normative assumptions about gender?
Valentina: It’s exactly as you’ve described, yes. I have nothing to add. I’ll just clarify that the idea of trans lightbulbs is not something I invented; I picked it up from trans internet culture. That’s where I learned the concept, and I think it’s wonderful to be able to share it with so many people who didn’t know about it.
Monika: Drawing from Mario Mieli, you note that all children are inherently fluid children until society molds them into cis, binary roles. This suggests that gender transgression isn’t modern; it’s ancient and universal, though capitalism and patriarchy have entrenched binaries for social control. How can we liberate children from these constraints, and is it ever too late for adults to free themselves as well?
Valentina: When I was little, I remember many moments when things didn’t fit for me and I didn’t understand them. I tried to hint at it subtly, to make myself heard, but in a very quiet voice, and all I ever found were answers. I think what can help free children from all these impositions is precisely to offer them the opposite: questions. Gender roles don’t make any sense as such; they are reinforced through memorization, repetition, and assimilation, and as adults, our capacity to ask ourselves questions about what happens to us and what surrounds us is very atrophied.
Monika: How do you think adults can relearn to question and free themselves from the gender norms they have internalized?
Valentina: However, children, in their eagerness to understand everything around them, can go much further than us if adults pose the right questions and don’t try to impose our answers on the ones they formulate. A very realistic scenario comes to mind: a five-year-old girl asking her father, ‘Dad, why doesn’t my brother have holes for earrings in his ears and I do?’ The classic answer would be ‘because you’re a girl,’ but does that really resolve her real doubt? Instead, how powerful could it be to answer, ‘That’s a good question; we did it thinking you would want it: would you have preferred we didn’t do it?’ or ‘Do you think he wants them too?’ or even further, ‘Why do you think so many girls wear them? Do they like it?’ This conversation, moreover, can also help weaken all the layers of gender we carry on top of us, which we adults are often unable to perceive.
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| Photo by Álvaro Minguito. |
Monika: Do you ever feel like you have to be a role model for other trans women, or do you resist that expectation?
Valentina: I’m a Capricorn, so I always think I should be a role model for everyone and in everything, haha! Just kidding. I believe my approach is precisely that no path is more or less valid than another when it comes to transitioning, or even understanding our own identity in relation to being trans. For me, when a trans woman tells me she has always been a woman, as you told me, it seems completely legitimate and valid, even if I hold a different view, especially at a structural level, that is, that everyone’s gender is part of a learned and imposed language, and no one is born a ‘man’ or a ‘woman.’ So no, I don’t feel that pressure. If someone, something that has happened to me, idealizes me by constructing an idea of me as exemplary, that exists only in their mind, and sooner or later, I will disappoint them. But I accept myself as polyhedral, erratic, and human.
Monika: Choosing a name is such a deeply personal act, often layered with meaning and significance. How did you come to choose the name Valentina? Does it hold a special resonance for you, perhaps reflecting your journey or embodying a feeling or aspiration?
Valentina: This is a very beautiful story. I don’t remember why I liked the name so much, but from a very young age, maybe around… 10 years old?, I had a strong urge to mother, and I imagined myself having a daughter and naming her Valentina. I even dreamed that I would come out of the kitchen with a plate of food and shout, ‘Valentinaaaa, time to eat!’ (which means ‘dinner’ in Catalan). So, when I began my transition and questioned whether I wanted to change my name, I also thought, ‘For me, it was a problem, as a trans person, that my birth name had a gendered connotation, because I then had to change it, so maybe naming your child Valentina isn’t a good idea because you’re already conditioning her.’ And that’s when it clicked, and I said, ‘Well, for me!’ It was a bit like becoming my own daughter!
Monika: When you came out, did your mother embrace you as her daughter? And do you feel any connection to her in the way you look, carry yourself, or even in your style and mannerisms?
Valentina: With my family in general, it was a long process, with its obstacles, and not only because of internalized transphobia, both theirs and mine, but also because every family has its own language, and some conversations become very complex depending on the dynamics at play. And this was complex for everyone. With my mother, it’s curious, because I have always perceived a lot of masculinity in her; she hasn’t been the classic feminine mother who submissively assumed the roles assigned to her as a woman. So, in any case, what I learned from her was precisely the opposite: that masculinity does not belong exclusively to men. For me, as a lesbian and trans person, that lesson is very valuable, because I feel that if I didn’t have references of masculine women and lesbians, I would surely feel very out of place. Also, I am terrible with some things typically assigned to femininity, like makeup, hairstyles, wearing high heels… Blessed feminine masculinity!
Monika: Do you remember the first time you met a transgender woman in person? What was that experience like, and how did it make you feel?
Valentina: You’re making me think a lot! I have a very clear memory of my first inputs of trans women on social media, who were also not very famous trans women creating educational content about transfeminism; I even remember some of their names, like Duna Haller or the YouTube channel Difracción Transfemmenista. However, in person, I don’t remember the moment I met the first trans woman. Maybe it was at a meetup of a small group of trans friends in Barcelona, whom I knew from Facebook and who invited me to their home, but I’m convinced that before that, some trans woman crossed my path and either I didn’t notice, didn’t give it importance, or simply forgot.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Valentina Berr.
Main photo by Gabo Caruso.
© 2025 - Monika Kowalska
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