"Contemporary Connections: Eva Luna and Transgender Identity"

Text in blue below taken from GLAAD resource: http://www.glaad.org/transgender/trans101

In Chapter 5 of Eva Luna we are introduced to the character Melisio. Isabel Allende created the character of Melisio in the mid 1980s (and the narrative is taking place 1930s-40s). Although the experience of transgender identity has been recorded since the beginning of history, the vocabulary of "transgender" as a descriptive identity did not emerge until the the 1970s. In the novel Melisio struggles with a way to communicate her** gendered bodily experience.

 "Melisio tweezed his facial hairs, then ran ether-soaked cotton over his face, so his skin was the texture of silk; he took pains with his long-fingered, slender hands, and every night brushed his hair one hundred times. he was tall, with strong bones, but he moved with such delicacy that he gave the impression of being fragile." (120)

Melisio's only explanation was that there was a woman inside him and she could not get used to the male body in which she was trapped as surely as if she were in a straitjacket...later when psychiatrists addled his brain with their questions, his answer was always the same: I am not a homosexual, I am a woman. This body is a mistake. Nothing more, nothing less." (121)

The description Melisio gives for her embodied experience clearly aligns with  our contemporary definitions of transgender identification as the link to GLAAD defines it:

Gender identity is someone's internal, personal sense of being a man or a woman (or as someone outside of that gender binary). For transgender people, the sex they were assigned at birth and their own internal gender identity do not match.

Yet, as the quote from the novel  indicates, during the era Melisio is written, sexual orientation and gender identity were not only conflated, they were also medicalized (and demonized) as psychiatric disorder. 

Gender identity is your own, internal, personal sense of being a man or a woman (or as someone outside of that gender binary).
Sexual orientation describes a person's enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to another person (for example: straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual).

"His father had been a bear of a man who had emigrated from Sicily and who every time he found his son playing with his sister's toys gave him a beating...His mother...stood her ground like a tigress when the father tried to force his son to kick a ball, box, drink, or, later, go to whorehouses." (121)

Trying to change a person's gender identity is no more successful than trying to change a person's sexual orientation -- it doesn't work. So most transgender people seek to bring their bodies more into alignment with their gender identity.

Melisio's childhood experience in which those close to her try to forcibly alter her actions and preferences was certainly common at the time, and unfortunately still a dominant experience today. The support of his mother speaks volumes to Melisio's ability to survive and and evolve as he grew into an adult.



***At this point in the novel Melisio does not identify with feminine pronouns. Yet, it is clear that her preferred identity is feminine and later in the story Melisio with self-identify as Mimi. So, I have chosen to use her/she in this post.