CAMAGÜEY. - Dayanis Daniela is 34 years old, but only in the last period of five years she has been called like that. Until October 2, 2012 everybody called her Daniel. She is a woman with doubts, many doubts; she might write a book of questions, as she began collecting them since she was a child.

“I have memories approximately from my 7 years of age. For all, even according to what I 'knew', I was a boy. To be born male was determining me to it, but I felt otherwise. The clothes and accessories of the women, of the girls; called my attention, my thing was not to play with cars... This way I grew.

“Later I perceived that I liked the boys. I was afraid, not for the sexual orientation, which I was discovering logically as an adolescent; also, because somehow I felt that it was not just that. Another thing was passing to me, also. I hated my thoughts, which betrayed me; they were leading me for the way of denying the genitals that God gave to me.

“This uncertainty is the point in which many decide to finish their lives. I confess that it came my mind in some moments. Especially, I wanted to understand why if according to everybody I was a male, if the biology was dictating that and therefore I had to get enthusiastic with certain things, it was not my reality. It turns out to be so difficult. And, it is more because you come to a world in which few people are prepared to help you. How was my family going to explain me what was happening to me? They could not, they did not know”.

Or that he thought until his fifteen years, when “mom“ gave him one of the happiest days of his existence through a promise which she has not trumped: "Daughter, I know everything. I was waiting for the correct moment to say it to you; I did not want to commit an error. Here you have a friend, here you have a sister, here you have your mother. Always come to me. Before any problem, I will be here for you. If I do not have the answer, I will go to search it where it is. While I exists, you will never be alone, you will never suffer alone”.

Of those words - oaths, Daniela drank forces: "It was a magic impulse. She brought me to the world. I owed her everything, and if she thought like that, if she understood me, if she supported me, so I should begin to go forward. I took the reins of my life and proposed to express who I was, and to do it with decency, being a good person and contributing to the society. Because of familiar heredity I was getting excited towards Infirmary and I directed my steps to this profession”.

“My mother had to go to the school often. They did not stand to see my long hair or my eyebrows; she defended me cheering them up to understand that I was like that and that they could only reproach me if I neglected my academic duties, and in that sense, there were no problems. ‘Do not ill-treat her, do not humiliate her’, she demanded.

“I began to work in 2003 at the Provincial Hospital Manuel Ascunce Domenech. One day, Doctor Félix González González, a recognized endocrinologist of this center, looked at me and asked me if I would like to be physically a woman. I answered him that it was my most valued dream and he sent me to a provincial consultation for trans persons. I did not even know that this consultation existed. I was 25 years old when I initiated the treatment.

“Sometimes I was lacking hopes, there was a doctor who was asking me why if I wanted to be a woman I was walking dressed as man. And I told to him that I rejected those clothes, that I did not want to use them, but officially I was a nurse of the hospital, with a contract signed under a masculine name; that I liked my work, and was putting it in risk if the one that was coming to the ward was a female nurse, because there was a rule to fulfill.

“Once I was sent to the capital I was feeling closer the 'remedy'. The whole team understood me. There, I learned that I was born feminine, that my genitals were those that were not corresponding to my genre. When the medical commission decided to operate me, I saw the stars and the sky, all... In 2012, October 3, I went out of the ward being completely a woman.

“For five days I waited to see my new body. Indescribable that moment in which they withdrew the blindfolds, the surgeon took a mirror and showed me my feminine genitals. A wonderful experience was the whole subsequent process, knowing this organ, using the shapers, experiencing the dilation. And to return home being what you want, with the support of your family is the best thing that can happen to anyone in a similar situation”.

She does not have yet a card of identity that credits her as a female. Another one of the things that she does not understand. If the most difficult and costly thing is the operation, why our lawyers have to happen years working to update the papers, she wonders.

While she waits for “the paperwork,” she enjoys this life that in several aspects started from zero. Her previous partner did not continue with her after surgery. “It happens to many transsexual - she tells - we stop being what they loved. I understood that in this sense for me I had to recommence”.

Daniela, as those who have always known her, prefer to call her, she is today the nurses' chief of the service of General Surgery in her hospital. She did a law of her premise of "injecting" fondness to the patients, of looking over the details that give a little push to the improvement of a patient.

She does not hold reproaches. She has a sacred list of thanks: her family, Mariela Castro, the doctor Rafael Cuan (chief of services of her ward), the infirmary direction, the supervisors, the partners; the director of the hospital, the doctor Miguel García Rodríguez … She also embraces God, says that He gave her a clear mind and showed her the way to come to the Cenesex and “to get fix” the body.

“If we learned to allow each person to be who she or he wants, to appear as she or he is, many would not go to an operations table. It would be simpler if it was possible to be present at the center of work or at any place with the wardrobe that everybody chooses, and I refer neither to the extravagance, nor the shamelessness with which heterosexual persons also dress, since for all there are logical behavior norms”, she thinks.

Now is she, without fear of what they will say, of the accusatory looks, to the gestures of scorn …: “Why is it easier for the people to judge?”, it is another of her permanent doubts. But it does not keep her awake. She dries the tears which pull her bad memories up, gets up and makes sure that tomorrow she will keep on giving all the love that she would like to receive from everybody.