Searching for oneself in the convent and finding oneself in transsexuality: the odyssey of Harry, the boy who wanted to be a nun

At 17, Harry Daniel Guallart (Valencia, 27 years old) was sure of three things: that he was a woman, that he was heterosexual, and that what he wanted most in the world was to be a nun.

None of the three turned out to be true.

“I wanted to be a nun and I couldn't because she was bisexual, so I was in conversion therapy for almost two years,” he tells ICON in a restaurant.

“One thing they tell you in therapy is that people with AMS can't be happy,” he announces.

AMS stands for “same-sex attraction” in conversion therapy terminology and is seen as a disorder.

Today he appears, and says, to have survived that beginning.

He lives in Madrid, studies Film Production, has a mustache, shaved head.

He wears dilations with plastic rings.

His vocation came to him gradually, partly thanks to his studies at the Santísima Trinidad religious center in Valencia.

"At the age of nine or 10, he would read stories of saints who died young and say: I want to be like that," he recalls.

His schoolmates tormented him for that idea.

“They came to call me

.

Damn, how creative”, he adds.

One of her favorite nuns from her center, one who played the piano and gave sweets and chocolates to the boys who went to see her after school, died one day.

Dragged from faith, he plunged into a turbulent adolescence.

He claims – a bit jokingly but not entirely – that between the ages of 13 and 15 he drank enough to last a lifetime (now that he takes testosterone he doesn't try alcohol).

"So he was an atheist and a punk who joked about burning churches," he says.

He was a rebel in a conservative family with ties to the Church: Harry's father, now deceased, was a prominent photographer of festivals and religious traditions who worked for a long time with the Archbishopric of Valencia.

Faith turned out to survive rebellion.

One day, an evangelical classmate invited him to her church, then his parents took him to a Piarist camp and, finally, he met the sisters of the Iesu Communio order of the Monastery of La Aguilera in Burgos, the institute A contemplative Catholic religious founded by Poor Clare Sister Verónica in 2010 and which in the previous decade had generated an unprecedented phenomenon in the Spanish Church, when it attracted dozens of young women, most of them university students, to embrace the contemplative life – that is, to closure–, in the Burgos towns of Lerma and La Aguilera.

“When I entered there, I understood that everything that had happened in my life up to that moment had happened so that I could be there”, she illustrates.

"I met them and I said to myself: I have found the place where I should be."

processions and calvaries

That impulse, however, began to collide with another, one that, in fact, distanced her from the convent: men were not the only ones that attracted her.

“The 12 years was the before and after.

I saw the video clip of

, which was the first time I saw two women kissing and thought, 'Why do I like this and why do I feel so guilty?

she remembers her now.

"Nobody told me it was wrong, I felt it was wrong."

He indulged in the most drastic solution imaginable.

From the age of 17 to 19, she paid 80 euros per session for a treatment that supposedly would make her heterosexual (which in Spain is still legal).

“The first thing that was asked of me was to inform my family that I was bisexual.

My mother ended up crying and my father told me that he would help me pay for the therapies, ”he recounts.

The treatment was carried out by a sexologist in her native Valencia who used apparently rational arguments, methods that seemed scientific to young Harry.

“What they told you is that if you are gay you have a conflict with your mother and if you are lesbian you have a conflict with your father.

Because they believe that homosexuality is caused by sexual abuse, trauma or poor psychosexual development.

According to him, they told him that for this trauma to disappear, the patient had to reconcile with his father, mother, uncle or whoever was the root of the

so that those feelings of attraction would disappear.

Another strategy of therapy: going to camps and in them, hugging people of the same sex, in a platonic way, without feeling anything sexual.

Another tactic: suppress the masculinity of his appearance: “Why was he asking me to pluck my eyebrows or dress as feminine as possible?” Harry now wonders.

"What did wearing a skirt or not wearing a skirt or waxing or not waxing have to do with sexual attraction?"

"And if they were right?"

Harry was already a conversion therapy veteran when he met a girl.

She was three years older than him, "a lantern in the dark," as she describes her today.

“She is dedicated to her community.

There is no need to know more."

Let's call her Lucía (fictitious name).

She and Harry met in a prayer group for María Reina de la Paz in Valencia and their union became very intense in a short time.

“Unbeknownst to me, we were in a relationship.

We talked about everything, all the time.

When she was not there, she wrote to him on her mobile what he thought and what he felt for her.

There were times when we could spend 15 minutes looking at each other without saying anything.

They never did anything physical, beyond long hugs.

“It was training to live in chastity, more than anything else,” she says.

“It was all very ethereal and spiritual.”

The Mary Queen of Peace group regularly makes pilgrimages to Medjurgorje, a Bosnian town of 4,000 inhabitants 25 kilometers from Mostar, where, it is said, the Virgin Mary appeared to six Croats in 1981. Lucia and her sister helped pay for the Harry's ticket for the pilgrimage.

Arriving at the exact point where the apparition had taken place, in the middle of a mountain, Harry found himself crying uncontrollably.

He still doesn't know if he was referring to her bisexuality or living as a woman.

Harry, at 21, at feminist camp.

The image is prior to his transition. Transfer of the personal archive of Harry Daniel Guallart

Lucía ended up also going to conversion therapy, where the sexologist ruled that they should not see each other anymore.

She “She decided that it was best for us to block each other on WhatsApp and not have any kind of relationship or contact.

But since we had the same group of friends, we had to pretend that nothing had happened.

Harry highlights the direness of her situation: "It's horrible to know that a person is going through the same thing as you but you can't comfort them."

“One of the things they tell you in conversion therapy is that you have to stay away from anything LGBTI.

They leave you isolated," Harry recalls.

“I got out of conversion therapy thanks to the

[stories in which, with existing characters in pop culture and the literary industry, new stories are created with romantic plots between people of the same sex].

I realized that I was fighting myself."

Years later, the consequences of the trauma suffered by the sexologist still affected him.

“I was with a wonderful girl for six months and every day she asked me: what if they were right?

“I thought a lot about denouncing the sexologist.

I saw that 20-year-old Lucía and thought that I had given her to the lions because she thought that those lions were good for her and for me.

And I said to myself: she's already there.

I don't want anyone to ever go through what we went through."

She cannot take legal action due to the time elapsed.

She still maintains contact with Lucía, about whom she limits herself to saying that she is at peace with her sexual orientation, she lives celibately and works on "what she most wants."

Harry, visiting a church in the nineties. Transfer of the personal file of Harry Daniel Guallart

souls have no gender

Harry was 21 years old when the sisters of the Iesu Communio, to which he aspired to belong six years ago, established a new convent in the municipality of Godella, north of Valencia.

But he had changed.

He was now a regular in radical feminist circles on social media and was relating to transgender people for the first time.

His first contact during a feminist camp led him to question many things, mainly what he had before the mirror.

He saw himself and did not recognize himself.

He remembers that when he was little he liked cars, tattoos, suits.

"I had just assumed that she was a tomboy girl and that was it."

But there was much more: “I did not have any kind of connection with my body.

When I was 17 I asked some of my friends where the clitoris was.

I did not have that stage of exploratory masturbation”.

The coincidence of discovering that he was a trans boy at the same time that a new convent was being established made Harry wonder what God wanted of him: “You wanted me to be a nun and now it turns out that I am a guy and I don't want to be a priest.

If I'm a woman, okay.

If I'm a guy, okay.

But I need this to be from God."

The acceptance process was hard in his family.

“They didn't want to say my name,” Harry recalls.

“I used to call my friends to hear my name.

My parents were conservative Catholics and I was, as far as is known, the only LGBTI person in my family."

(The name, by the way, comes from the first Harry Styles album, named after the singer, which he was listening to at the time: “If I had been listening to a Billy Joel album, right now I would call myself Billy Joel”).

Harry offered to talk to people with LGBTI families, including Opus Dei members with transgender children.

“There was one time when my mother made me talk to two people who told me that she had to read me a book written by John Paul II on gender ideology [the 1993 encyclical

.

People forget that he coined that phrase, ”emphasizes Harry, who felt that he now had to justify his existence from one day to the next.

Another person told him that he had the "soul of a woman," to which Harry replied that, according to Christian theology, souls have no gender.

Things with his family ended up improving, but not before his toll of darkness, which included a suicide attempt.

“To the best of their ability, they have managed to accept that I am a man, in his own way,” Harry says.

He admits that it wasn't easy for his father to put his beliefs on his side to love his son.

Over the years Harry has gone to members of the Church to discuss spiritual issues, but the response he has received has generally been unsympathetic: “A high priest explained it to me with a drawing.

He told me: 'On this side is the LGBTI

, gender ideology, etc.

And in this other is the Church.

You have to choose".

Harry does not forget that he replied: "The Church has always tried to change me while LGBTI people have welcomed me with open arms."

“I have never had a conflict with being transgender and being Catholic.

The only one that has had the conflict is the Church, ”he points out.

He admits that everything he's been through would make it very easy for him to be an atheist, but he remains a man of faith.

"The most beautiful thing I will ever have in my life is to know, no matter how I change, I know that God loves me exactly as I am."

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