"They told me: 'Think about it.' I always had it clear "

The first time Eli agreed to play with a ball, she was wearing a dress.

“She did it so that everyone was clear that she was a girl,” explains her mother, Violeta Herrero.

She played with Barbie dolls, she loved

glitter sparkle

.

Until she transitioned, which means that at the age of six she began to present herself as the girl she realized from a very young age.

With a new name - Eli, from Elián, purposely chosen for ambiguity - and the clothes he wanted.

Then he already approached the rest of the toys and stopped being suspicious of playing with his brothers, two boys.

“First I thought that we had made a mistake with the traffic.

Then I understood that he felt free to play with whatever he wanted, ”says the mother.

Eli Ruiz, who turns 17 next week, listens to pop, plays volleyball and is in 1st year of high school with an average grade of 8. He wears large silver earrings and blue locks between his long brown hair.

And she enjoys going out with her friends in Fuenlabrada, the municipality of Madrid where she lives.

Eli and his mother speak with EL PAÍS by video call.

Violeta looks at her with rapture, sitting next to her in the living room.

Since she was very little, she had to deal with her questions, like the one she asked when she was three years old: “Mom, who was wrong with me?

God, doctors or Mother Nature?

She says that her daughter was always clear about it, while the world around her, including herself, tried to get used to the idea.

Her husband assimilated it better than she, who needed to go to the psychologist "in the face of vertigo and fear" to make a mistake with the girl.

Violeta Herrero is 50 years old and is an ordinance in the Madrid City Council.

He is also an activist for different organizations.

Among others, Chrysallis, the association of families of trans minors, with more than 2,000 members.

It is one of the entities that cry out against the "pathologization" of trans people.

The World Health Organization (WHO) removed in 2018 gender dysphoria [disagreement between the assigned sex and the one with which the person feels identified] from the list of psychiatric disorders.

The draft of the

trans law

that has been prepared by the Ministry of Equality plans to eliminate the requirement of a psychological report or the two years of hormonal training that mark the current regulations to be able to change the sex on the DNI.

• The 'trans law' from opposite angles

This "pathologization" that the organizations speak of is what Herrero remembers of his daughter's passage through different medical services.

The first psychiatrist who analyzed Eli, who was four years old at the time, told him that it was impossible, that it couldn't be a girl.

And he asked her to set limits: "Children have to learn to be frustrated from an early age, he told me," recalls the mother.

In order to change their name on their DNI - they have not yet made the sex change in the registry - they had to present a dozen documents.

As a 50-page report commissioned from a forensic psychologist: “One of the consultations consisted of naming her all the time in masculine, in addition to analyzing her father and me from all sides, to see that we had not intervened in any way so that it was like this ”, says Herrero.

Her family and friends know that she is a trans girl, although sometimes they forget.

One of her friends asked her once if her period had come.

In high school, there are people who have no idea: "I'm not counting it for life either."

At the age of 11 and a half, Eli Ruiz began to take the hormonal blockers that slow down puberty.

"I needed them, my testosterone was starting to go up," he explains.

Why are they so important?

What would have happened if you didn't take them?

"It's hard for me to imagine it," he replies.

And for the first time she gets really serious.

“If a cis girl [cisgender: person whose gender identity matches the assigned sex] who knows that her chest is going to grow, grew a beard, it would cause her a lot of suffering.

In trans people it is the same ”.

Since 2017, she combines an injection of blockers every three months with estrogen patches, the cross-hormone treatment.

The young woman assures that she had thought about it well before taking the step with the hormone: "Everyone told me to think it over, but I was very clear about it," she explains.

Eli Ruiz has answered and raised many questions, from a very young age.

One of them, if he was going to be able to carry "a child in his gut."

"I told him no.

I explained to him what the body was like inside, I showed it to him through drawings.

And I explained that he could adopt them.

He replied: 'ah, I adopt them ”.

The girl Eli liked that solution: “At the age of seven or eight, she said: 'Mom, I'm going to adopt a boy and a girl.

I'll call the boy Iker and the girl Alicia ”.

At this point in the talk, the adolescent smiles from ear to ear, like the one who has heard an old conversation a thousand times whose end, which she loves, would be such that:

"What if they happen to be like you?"

- Oh no.

Since I am going to adopt them when they are six years old, they will already know what they are.

"Medicalization is not the only resource"

The draft of the 'trans law', which is currently being debated by government partners after the PSOE has put the text in quarantine, provides for hormonal treatment to minors, who may give their informed consent from the age of 16, the health age of majority under the patient autonomy law.

According to the PSOE, the draft "offers few guarantees if the procedure or the medical criteria to be taken into account are not specified" to decide.

These treatments, however, are already included in up to 11 regional laws approved in recent years on trans people.

Eli Ruiz, in fact, has been on a cross-hormone and blocker treatment for six years.

Marcelino Gómez Balaguer is an endocrinologist and head of the Gender Identity Unit at Doctor Peset Hospital (Valencia), one of the oldest in Spain.

He confirms that if the law were approved as stated in the draft "it would not particularly affect the main lines of action" carried out in his unit, where they began to serve trans people in 2002. The Valencian Community is one of those with regulations its own, approved in 2017 and in whose preparation Gómez Balaguer participated, which also includes the informed consent of minors from 16 years of age.

At Doctor Peset “this problem has never arisen.

No minor has raised something that the parents rejected ”, explains this specialist.

They have attended more than a thousand cases.

In 2020, the demand for adolescents aged 16 to 21 years multiplied by four, with 60 cases only from the province of Valencia.

In his unit, which works with "depathologization principles", the team is made up of a sexologist, a psychologist, pediatrician, gynecologists and surgeons, to "do a comprehensive monitoring, not in pieces".

“There are people who do not need medication, but they do need the hostile environment, the social movement in the school or the administrative procedures.

Sometimes it is about accompanying the family more than the transgender person, who lives it with the most absolute of normalities ”.

He defends that medicalization "is one more resource but not the only one".

“The best thing would be to accept that there are boys with a vulva and girls with a penis.

We force binarisms within transsexuality, which is diverse.

Always pushing the scalpel and the hormone is like putting a black and white brush on a rainbow ”.