interview

Anna  was not born a woman. She became one.

She was born in a village outside Katerini. The third child of the family. Before her where two boys, followed by a girl. At the age of 8, her family moved to Athens. Everyone could see that something was off about this child. Immitating women voices, wearing her mother’s cloths, doing cores in the house, and shifting the furniture around. 

«Until I was 10-11 my effeminacy was visible. That was when I started exploring my sexuality. They thought it was something that would just go away. In our neighborhood though they began to whisper. The more I walked in the neighborhood they called me Miss Vasso». They confused me with my mother. I was what they called «femaled». 

«My mom was always there. Like years later when I said I would do the sex-change operation, and I heard my aunt, who had just lost her child say to my mother: ‘Your scar is bigger than mine’ meaning me. And my mother, an illiterate woman, with a calm voice replies to her: ‘What are you saying? Me, I look at my child and hug it. Look how beautiful she is!’" 

I burst into tears with my mother’s calmness, with the fact that she had accepted me and she had loved what I was. My family history has no blood.»

 At the age of 15, she knows what’s going on. «I had my first sexual interaction. We break up though. I am constantly listening to Barbara Sreisand and ‘I am a woman in love’. Then my mom approaches me. ‘I know what’s going on with you. I don’t want you to say yes or no. I know where you are going and I know who you are going out with. I only want two things from you: if you can to let me be by your side and please don’t start messing with drugs’ For the second one I didn’t abide by...». 

At school things are not easy.  «I liked school. Sometimes at cold winter nights, when my mother would lay us down around the stove to sleep ,I would read to everyone what we learned in school and that’s how my dad would fall asleep. Yes I liked school, but the calling of names had reached its point.» How could a child so different survive in the teenage jungle of high school? 


«In the meantime my body was completely feminine.  At that time I happen to look at a magazine. A  photograph on the cover for the Transvestite Beauty Peagants and the title ‘The UFO came to earth’. I was enchanted. I thought ‘Is it possible that these are men? Where are the bears? No way.’ That’s when I knew I wanted to be like that.»

She dropped out of school and started working at a fabric shop. Her movements feminie. Customers called her misses. The owner was bothered and fired her. Same with the next one. At nights she went out at Plaka, which in the late 70s was what is today Gkazi, a very gay friendly area. She finds out about the places where trans went.

« That’s when I met  other transexuals. I started hanging out at their houses, wearing their clother and make up.. I would ask ‘How did your hair grow? How do you have breasts? Why don’t I have?». 

And while they showed her a world that she too wanted to be part of, they also introduced her to drugs.

 «One night, it must have been around 2pm,  I met a handsome young man who suggests that he walks me home. He also meets a friend with a van and he suggests that he takes us home. We end up in Aspropirgos in a field where he and 5 more raped me. But right now I don’t want to expand on this story...It’s all in my book».*

She was 15. She didn’t say anything to anyone. Her mother found out by reading the book. «Perhaps she should have never read it. Because that is also where she found out about the drugs. Even though I never did heroin, I went through a lot of stages in my life, that harmed me and didn’t want for her to know.. When my mother read it she cried and screamed: ‘Where was I? Where are they, so I can kill them?’».

She is 18 when she goes out in Siggrou Avenue. That’s when she starts experimenting with hormones without prescription, just listening to what one and the other has to say about it. She is still living at home with her parents. She says she is working at a bar. Siggrou was the only way out;
 «Have you seen many trans working in the public sector, in an office, somewhere? No. Well then, that Siggrou was the only way out for me. And today this is the road. Besides very few, like a kid I know, he wishes to do the operation and has his parents paying for everything: the operation, the therapists...I am jealous of this kid and I admire him.»

5 years later, at 25 years, she makes the big decision. To have the operation. 
«It cost 1 million drachmas, the operation, the doctor, the tickets. In the return, at the airport my mom waited for me with a bouquette. My dad for the first time on the phone called me ‘my girl’, until that day he called me ‘my child’. Without a name. 


After a month she returned to work. «A virgin-hooker», as she is accustomed of saying jokingly. Is she a woman now? «I wasn’t born a woman but I became one. I have never had energetic sex in my life. I have never used my male part. When they ask for my advice, I don’t answer. When you wake up one day and you feel like you can’t stand that thing you have in between your legs, you will have the answer you seek».

Anna has fought a lot,. alone, without money, with anti-depressants, she found herself fighting with her deamons.  Then she began to write, like how she always did when she didn’t feel well. Two pages became ten and ten pages became a book. A book without emotional lyricism but adventurous, violent and simultaneously affectionate. Today she works as a bar woman at the club Koukles, and she writes her own columns at free press magazines.