It Was No One Else But Me | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante. I’m Daniel Alarcón. 

Today we begin in La Plata, Argentina. Journalist María Candelaria Schamun was born there 43 years ago and spent her entire childhood there. A happy childhood, but plagued by doctors, tests and medications.

She remembers one particular routine that used to take place on Saturdays: A blood sample was drawn, then she had to walk for an hour without stopping, and another sample would be taken.

[Candelaria Schamun]: So my father had devised some kind of game to encourage me to walk, which was that for every kiosk we saw along the way, he would buy me a pack of little pictures. 

[Daniel]: He hoped this would keep her distracted so she wouldn’t ask him to carry her when she was tired. She also had to collect urine samples in a jar, have X-rays of her hands taken to check her growth, and take her medication punctually at 5 p.m. Her parents had to import it from the United States because it was not available in Argentina.

And although the issue of her health was always present, her parents never explained to her clearly what she had. Or at least they didn’t explain everything to her. She knew she had a disease that affects the adrenal glands. Not much more.

[Candelaria]: They referred to it as ‘Cande’s health.’ But that was all, ‘Cande’s health,’ instead of everything that it entailed. Beyond that label, there was silence.

[Daniel]: In her early teenage years, she had the first operation she can remember. She was 13 at the time, and in Buenos Aires. Her father, Miguel, had died a year earlier, and she and her mother, whom they called China, had to face the situation while in mourning.

[Candelaria]: The truth is that nobody explained to me what they were going to do. I went into the operating room. I remember they made me sit on the stretcher. The anaesthetist put something cold on my spine and gave me an injection with a very thick needle. They made me count to three and I fell asleep.

[Daniel]: When she woke up, she was in a different room. As soon as she opened her eyes, she saw her mother praying. Still half unconscious, she touched her lower belly, which was bandaged. She felt like her bladder was going to explode, but she couldn’t urinate even though she wanted to. This made her desperate. Her mother tried to calm her down and explained that she had a catheter in place.

The postoperative period was long and painful. They spent three weeks in Buenos Aires, at Aunt Poliya’s house, a beautiful and spacious apartment in the Recoleta neighborhood.

[Candelaria]: My mother had bought a hair dryer, and with the cold, every time I peed she would blow cold air so that it would dry quickly and not hurt. 

[Daniel]: No one outside the family knew about that operation. She told her friends at school that she was going on vacation.

The next surgery she remembers was at age 17, to resolve the urinary incontinence she had suffered since the previous operation. But that time, fortunately, the postoperative period was not so painful and the recovery was much faster.

So a few weeks later, Candelaria was getting ready to go to a party. She was talking to a friend on the phone about what dress to wear, and they agreed on a time to pick her up. A typical teenage conversation. There is no explanation for what she did right after hanging up.

[Candelaria]: I hung up the phone and, for no apparent reason, I walk down the stairs, 28 marble steps, to the study that belonged to my father. I go to the desk made of carob wood. I open one of the drawers, and there was a green folder with a white label that said, “Health, María Candelaria.”

[Daniel]: She opened the folder immediately. There were several medical studies and a summary of her medical history. She read everything quickly, skipping lines. But there were more papers in there. Hurriedly, she kept looking. She didn’t want anyone to discover her with that folder in her hand. Although it had her name on it, she sensed that there was something in there that no one wanted her to see.

[Candelaria]: And there was a birth certificate that said, “October 5, 1981. Esteban Schamun.”

[Daniel]: Esteban Schamun. It was her same date of birth and her same last name.

[Candelaria]: I felt a heat that I never felt again in my life. It was like being hit with a mallet. It left me stunned; I couldn’t believe what I was reading and I didn’t want to read it.

[Daniel]: “Cande’s health,” the label that had accompanied her all her life, was now transforming into something completely different. Something much more complex than simply glands that failed to work properly.

[Candelaria]: The first reaction I had was like, “What have they done to me?”

[Daniel]: Suddenly, everything started to make sense.

[Candelaria]: I got it all figured out. I understood why so many surgeries. I understood why so many trips to the doctor. I understood why so much silence. I understood so many secrets. 

[Daniel]: Because at that very moment, she discovered who Esteban really was.

[Candelaria]: I knew he wasn’t a twin brother who had died. He wasn’t a cousin. He wasn’t anyone, no one other than me.

[Daniel]: We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Our producer Aneris Casassus brings us the story.

[Aneris Casassus]: Candelaria stood there for a few moments with that green folder in her hand, unable to fully believe what she was reading. Her body felt increasingly hot. And the thoughts came one after another, completely overwhelming her. 

[Candelaria]: And I felt like a monster. I felt like a horrible, disgusting person. I didn’t know whether I had been a man, or I was a man, or I was a woman, or what I was. 

[Aneris]: Because in that medical record she managed to read that her disease had altered her genitals, and that when she was born, they thought she was a boy. A boy called Esteban. 

She couldn’t bear reading on much more.

[Candelaria]: I closed the folder. I went upstairs, returned to my mother’s room, looked at myself in the mirror, started punching myself, I got into the shower and stayed in a fetal position for a long time.

[Aneris]: When she calmed down a bit, she came out of the bathroom, picked up the phone, and called her friend again to tell say she wasn’t feeling well and that she wasn’t going to the party. She didn’t tell her anything about what she had read in that folder. Not her or anyone else. And so it went on for a long time. But there wasn’t a single day when that name, Esteban, disappeared from her head. 

[Candelaria]: When I was taking a shower, when I was cooking, when I was kissing someone, I always knew that at some point that thought was going to come back.

[Aneris]: She started hating that name.

[Candelaria]: My brother’s best friend was called Esteban. So, when he came to my house, I was disgusted when my mother would say, “Hey, do you want something to drink?” or whatever. And she called him “Esteban.” And everything disgusted me; it gave me a horrible feeling.

[Aneris]: Finding the green folder was a turning point in her life. 

[Candelaria]: I started having a super-punky, super-trashy adolescence. I hurt myself a lot.

[Aneris]: She drank a lot of alcohol, had anger issues and violent behavior. She distanced herself from her mother. And she didn’t feel strong enough to confront her, to ask her questions. Silence had always been a constant in her family.

[Candelaria]: And today, I think I kept quiet and didn’t tell my mother anything I knew so as not to expose her, and to protect her, because I felt that if I said, “Hey, I know everything, what did you do to me,” that could hurt her.

[Aneris]: At the time, her mother was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, so she felt that confrontation would make everything worse. But the reality was that she didn’t think she could handle the answers. 

[Candelaria]: There are times when, as a survival mechanism, we don’t ask questions we don’t want, or can’t bear, to hear. That’s what it is. To what extent we hide behind a shell so as to avoid being aware of everything that’s happening. 

[Aneris]: And so, the snowball of silence and anger grew larger and larger. Living with her mother became unbearable. In one of those fights, her mother said it would be best for her to leave the house.

Some time later, around the age of 20, she started dating a young man and began her sexual life. It was a very difficult experience, and over time, things didn’t improve. In fact, every time she had sex, she tried to imagine a beach or a forest. 

[Candelaria]: It was quite painful and traumatic, and all I wanted was for it all to happen and be over quickly. And no, I didn’t feel any pleasure.

[Aneris]: Afterward, she suffered from urinary tract infections and her entire body ached. But she never said anything. She was with him for five years, then she had a girlfriend, and that didn’t work either. She couldn’t even talk about it with her friends and family. It was 10 years of silence. Until she decided it was an issue in her life that needed to be resolved.

She began therapy, but in the first few sessions, she didn’t even dare tell the psychologist. It took her several weeks to do so. And then the psychologist asked her why she had never spoken to her mother. Every time she tried, she explained, her throat would completely close up. Her tonsils would fill with pus, and she would end up taking antibiotics. Silence turned into a symptom.

They worked on it, and after a few sessions, she was ready to face her mother. So Candelaria gathered her courage, called her mother, and told her they needed to talk, asking whether she could come see her in Buenos Aires, where she had moved some time ago. 

[Candelaria]: She came to my apartment. We sat across from each other, at a tiny table I had in the dining room. I told her I needed her to please let it all out, to tell me what had happened when I was born, that I needed her to get this weight off her shoulders and start talking. 

[Aneris]: Very nervously, her mother picked up a paper napkin and began to tear it to shreds. 

[Candelaria]: And she said that she would write me a letter, and that afterward, if I didn’t want to speak to her again, that I had the right not to, but that she had done everything the doctors had told her, and that everything they had done was to save me, and that it had been out of love. 

[Aneris]: Neither Candelaria nor her mother mentioned the name Esteban in that conversation.

A few days later, the letter arrived. Six handwritten pages, enclosed in an envelope marked “Cande.”

[Candelaria]: The first time I read it was during therapy, because I was kind of scared to read it alone.

[Aneris]: It started like this:

[Candelaria]:  Normal delivery. 5:30 a.m., 4.2 kilos. Male, undescended testicles. Constant monitoring. As a mother, I was concerned about the amount of time you slept…

[Aneris]: The first few lines were almost a summary of her medical history.

Her mother realized something was wrong because Candelaria vomited every time she drank milk and was losing weight very quickly. So she rushed to the Children’s Hospital, where she was admitted immediately.

[Candelaria]: It was ten days of anguish and despair because no one would risk giving a diagnosis…

[Aneris]: Then the diagnosis came: salt-wasting congenital adrenal hyperplasia. A disease that affects the adrenal glands and can lead to death if left untreated. These glands are responsible for producing various hormones necessary for life, including growth-related hormones in both males and females. 

[Candelaria]: And then they told us that the condition had altered the shape of your external genitalia, and that you were a girl. Two situations: Get the right dose of medicine to prevent your condition from becoming unstable. And two: Scheduled surgeries to improve the malformation. What was clear to us was that we had to raise you as a normal person.

[Aneris]: The letter gave Candelaria many of the missing pieces to put her story together, though not all. The name Esteban didn’t appear in that letter, either.

Just as she had done when she found the folder, she didn’t ask any more questions or talk about it with her mother again. But she treasured the letter.   

[Candelaria]: Whenever I moved, it was the first thing I packed. The letter’s creases are tightly folded from opening and closing it so many times.

[Aneris]: In the following years, she gave in more than once to the urge to sit at the computer and Google her diagnosis and the names of the doctors she remembered treating her. This led her to discover explanatory videos that showed cases, she assumed, very similar to her own.

[Candelaria]: And when I watched those videos, on the one hand, I was relieved that it wasn’t my body, but I also wondered whose body that was.

[Aneris]: And whether that body had given permission to be shown. This last point particularly tormented her: finding photos of her as if she were a case study, a phenomenon. 

[Candelaria]: That bothers me. I wonder who saw those pictures, where those pictures were, and whether any of those pictures are part of a medical textbook.

[Aneris]: But in 2015, when she was 34 and her mother began to show the first signs of Alzheimer’s, she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. A few years later, when she went to her mother’s house, she discovered that in a notebook she’d begun writing down  birthdays, the names of her friends and children, and her own name. It was clear to Candelaria that she didn’t have much more time to ask questions.

[Candelaria]: I need to know before she dies and takes everything with her.

[Aneris]: Every time she visited her mother, Candelaria rummaged through her papers to see whether she could find anything that could help her piece together the story. 

[Candelaria]: I told my mother I was organizing the closets, then I’d take down boxes and start searching, searching, searching for every little thing. I searched and searched and searched and searched…

[Aneris]: She also took her mother out for rides in the car and to significant places, trying to get her to remember something: the house where they had lived during her childhood, the Children’s Hospital where she had been admitted, the school she had attended.

[Candelaria]: She didn’t remember much, and when I tried to ask more about it, she gave vague answers. 

[Aneris]: But Candelaria was determined to face the issue. After many years of therapy and a long internal process, she felt strong enough to hear all the answers. And if her mother was no longer able to give them to her, she would look elsewhere.

[Daniel]: We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Aneris Casassus continues the story. 

[Aneris]: Candelaria then began to investigate. 

She contacted some of her uncles and a close friend of her mother’s. They might help her; they had probably been very close to her parents when she was born, and could tell her everything that had happened.

[Candelaria]: But what I sensed every time I tried to approach someone was still a great silence, a lot of silence. 

[Aneris]: She had to persist, find someone willing to break the silence. So she kept sending WhatsApp messages:

[Archive Soundbite]

[Candelaria]: Hi, Sandry. How are you? Is everything okay? I went out for a walk. I’m going to send you…

[Aneris]: In 2021, more than 20 years after finding the folder, she sent an audio recording to Sandra, the oldest of her 23 maternal cousins, the daughter of Aunt Poliya, who had died a few years earlier. Sandra was 19 when Candelaria was born.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Candelaria]: I wanted to ask you whether you could send me an audio. Whether you remember when I was a baby, when you changed my diapers. Because, well, I’m trying to reconstruct that story, which is my story. 

[Aneris]: A few days later, she received Sandra’s first answer, two audio recordings totaling 15 minutes. 

[Archive Soundbite]

[Sandra]: Hi, Cande. How are you? I know I owe you something, and well, I want to send you this message at once. All this time I’ve been thinking a lot about your story as a baby, which I can help you reconstruct.

[Aneris]: Sandra knew all the facts her mother had written in the letter and remembered many more things that weren’t on that piece of paper. She was the person who could give her the most information about those first moments of her life.   

[Candelaria]: She is like the family ledger, where every memory is kept in detail. She knows everything. She’s the one who knew from the beginning, and my mother trusted her and told her minute by minute what was happening. 

[Aneris]: All these years, Sandra had assumed Candelaria already knew everything that had occurred. The silence, she thought, couldn’t have lasted that long. This is Sandra:

[Sandra]: I assumed Cande knew. It didn’t occur to me that she didn’t know. It was something we’d put behind us, so to speak, because it had already happened, and now life had to just be lived with that problem. 

[Aneris]: But when Sandra began talking to Candelaria, she realized that Candelaria had only fragments of information, that there were many gaps to fill. And she was willing to help her; she didn’t want to continue keeping the secret that the whole family had kept locked away for so long.

I met with Sandra at her apartment, the same one Candelaria had lived in as a child, the one where she went through that excruciating postoperative period at age 13. We began talking about the beginning of Candelaria’s story. 

[Sandra]: Cande was born. Well, not really. Cande wasn’t born. Esteban was. Mother told me Esteban was born, and the two of us took the bus to meet Esteban. We arrived. He was a gorgeous baby, fat, big, and very red.

[Aneris]: He was wearing a little green outfit. He looked healthy. The fact that his testicles hadn’t descended—the doctors said—was nothing to worry about for the moment. It’s something that happens to between one and three percent of full-term boys. The testicles usually descend on their own from the groin into the scrotum at around six months. So it was just a matter of waiting.

Esteban’s mother, China, also looked fine. She told Sandra that labor had been difficult and long, and that all she had done was pray to the Virgin that everything would pass. But now, with the baby in her arms, she felt much better.

Miguel, the father, was a staunch Catholic. He went to Mass every day and prayed at the table every night. And he wanted Esteban, like his other children, to be baptized within the first five days of his life; it was a very important sacrament. So, as soon as Esteban was discharged, he received a blessing in the Cathedral of La Plata, the city’s most imposing church. The letter E was embroidered on the baptismal robe that covered Esteban, and his name was carved on the candle carried by the godfather. After the ceremony, they had a party at home with family and friends. 

[Sandra]: At that baptismal ceremony, Miguel read the Gospel passage about Esteban [Stephen], who was the first martyr of the church. 

[Aneris]: The choice of name had clearly been religious.

Everything was going relatively normally, but 20 days later, Esteban began vomiting and having diarrhea. It wasn’t the typical vomiting of a newborn; it was something that caught their attention. He spent hours and hours sleeping, dark circles under his eyes had appeared, and the soft spot on his head—the fontanelle—seemed sunken in.

Things weren’t improving, so on day 36, while Miguel was at work, China left her other children with their grandmother, took the car, and rushed Esteban to the Children’s Hospital. He was admitted immediately; he needed to be stabilized.

[Sandra]: They could hardly explain how he could be alive, because his potassium levels were extremely high and his sodium extremely low.

[Aneris]: He spent several days in the hospital, while various tests were performed. It was an endocrinologist who suspected the diagnosis of salt-wasting congenital adrenal hyperplasia. As soon as he was able to confirm it, he called China and Miguel in for a meeting. It was December 1981, just a few days before Christmas. Esteban was a little over two months old. 

[Sandra]: And that’s when they are told everything that is in the medical record. He had a disease that, while still in the womb, had caused what we might call a virilization of the female sexual organs, the external organs. This is what happened. Esteban isn’t Esteban; he’s a girl.

[Aneris]: It wasn’t that his testicles hadn’t descended; the testicles didn’t exist, and the clitoris had the appearance and size of a penis. 

[Sandra]: The said that a genetic study had been done, and that she was a 46XX. So she was a girl. There was no doubt about it—she was a girl.

[Aneris]:A quick refresher: In humans, each cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46. All of these pairs look the same in men and women. Only the 23rd pair, the sex chromosomes, are different. Women have two copies of the X chromosome, while men have one X and one Y chromosome. Esteban was 46XX, meaning that genetically, he was a female.

Sandra remembers that it wasn’t easy for China and Miguel to break the news…

[Sandra]: Having to go out and face the world, to say, “No, it’s not a boy; it’s a girl.”

[Aneris]: Telling her other children in the simplest way possible that the doctors had simply made a mistake and they actually had a sister. And, of course, choosing a new name for her, also with religious significance: María Candelaria.

It was hard for the whole family to swallow. Sandra couldn’t believe it, either, when she was told.

[Sandra]: I changed her diapers, as I did for many other cousins. It’s not that he was somehow different from a boy, a little boy. No, that wasn’t what caught your attention. He was a boy. 

[Aneris]: Sandra remembers something that China said those days, perhaps to soften the trauma of what they were experiencing.

[Sandra]: And this is what my aunt China said: “Well, the only way a girl could come into this family was in disguise. Because with so many boys…” And that always stayed with me. The little girl in disguise.

[Aneris]: She said that and then went out immediately to buy pink dresses and clothes for a two-month-old baby girl.

The doctors’ instructions, China told them, had been clear.

[Sandra]: She has to be on lifelong medication to compensate for the hormone she lacks because of her malfunctioning gland. And she needs reconstructive surgery as soon as possible.

[Aneris]: Surgery to adjust her genitals to the female anatomy. There would be more than one surgery, because as she grew older, they would have to do further interventions. One of them would be when she started puberty. 

[Sandra]: They told her, “She is going to develop normally as a female, she will preserve her fertility, she is going to be a normal woman.” 

[Aneris]: They began to investigate, looking for the best doctors to perform the procedure.

Candelaria’s parents had thought of going to the United States, but all the specialists agreed that Argentina had professionals trained for that. They all agreed, as well, that that was the right thing to do. 

[Sandra]: You put yourself in the doctor’s hands and trust what he tells you. Besides, everyone said the same thing. No one ever questioned that that was the path to follow. 

[Aneris]: The first surgery was at around the age of three months, in Buenos Aires. Sandra’s parents went to the clinic to be with China and Miguel during the procedure. Sandra and her brother waited at home. That night, when they returned… 

[Sandra]: We went over to hear the news. Then my father said, “Well, it’s done, it’s over. Now, we will not talk about this any more.”

[Aneris]: Sandra reacted immediately:

[Sandra]: So I said to him, “But Dad, how can we not talk about it anymore? Candelaria needs to know what happened to her. It’s a health issue.” My father was quiet because he obviously agreed with what I was saying. But anyway, he had probably received instructions, or a request—I don’t know what to call it—from Candelaria’s parents not to talk about this again.

[Aneris]: The subject was never explicitly discussed again.

The second surgery was at 9 months old, also in Buenos Aires. In those first two surgeries, the doctors mutilated what had been diagnosed as a “virilized clitoris” and opened her vaginal canal for the first time. They would do the same thing again at age 13, according to the growth of her body. There are parameters in medicine for measuring the external genitalia, called the Prader scale. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 is considered the normal size of a girl’s clitoris. Candelaria had been classified as a 5, meaning complete virilization.

After those surgeries, Sandra accompanied China and Candelaria to medical checkups several times. But conversations about Candelaria’s health were limited to strictly medical matters. They never spoke of Esteban again, nor about what they planned to tell Candelaria in the future. But Sandra soon realized that the plan was to erase any trace of that boy.

Sandra remembers one day when they had gone to visit her mother in La Plata. Her mother was helping China with the blanket they had used for Esteban’s baptism.

[Sandra]:  My mother was undoing the stitching of the initials Cande’s godmother had embroidered, then, sort of re-embroidering the initials, C instead of E. And I also remember that my mother brought her, from Buenos Aires, the re-done baptismal cards.

[Aneris]: There wasn’t a new ceremony, but there was a photograph of Candelaria, older—about one year old—next to her parents holding the baptismal candle with her name carved in red. A mock baptism.

A birth certificate was also needed, including the new name and female gender.

[Sandra]: And I remember that Cande’s father, who was incredibly blinded, didn’t want a corrected birth certificate. He wanted a new birth certificate that said Candelaria Schamun, and to that end he filed a legal request. It was all done so that there would be no trace of Esteban anywhere. 

[Aneris]: With all this information that Sandra had shared, Candelaria would pursue those traces that her family had wanted to erase. Because if her parents had gone to court, there had to be a file. One of those days when she was going through her mother’s closets, she had found the number of a court case on a slip of paper. It could be a lead. So she called Juan, another of her cousins, a lawyer.

Juan told her she should make a formal request to un-archive the file. He could be her legal representative. But he warned her that it might no longer exist. In any case, without much hope, they prepared a document and filed it in court. Now they could do nothing but wait.

[Daniel]: We’ll be right back after the break.

[Daniel]: We’re back. Aneris continues tieh the story.

[Aneris]: While trying to piece together her story and waiting for a response from the courts, Candelaria had begun to talk openly about the subject with a few trusted people. The first person she told was Jazmín, her current wife. She also decided to tell her friends. One day, she was talking to one of them, telling her about the things she was discovering. And her friend, who was doing postgraduate studies in comprehensive sexual education, said:

[Candelaria]: “Look, Cande, I think you’re intersex. Because in the Postgraduate program on Comprehensive Sexuality Education, they gave us some material by Mauro Cabral, who is a global leader in intersex rights, and everything he talks about or shares seems very similar to what happened to you and what you’re going through.” She said, ‘Why don’t you get in touch with Mauro?’”

[Aneris]: Mauro Cabral is an Argentinean intersex activist living in Belgium. Mauro was born without a vagina, and during his adolescence he had two surgeries, followed by several more interventions under general anesthesia, to have a vagina constructed. All this left him with physical and psychological scars. Candelaria followed her friend’s advice and wrote to him. Mauro responded immediately and added her to a WhatsApp group.  

[Candelaria]: , I was talking for the first time with people who had gone through similar situations. In fact, until that moment, I didn’t even know the word intersex existed. No, no, I didn’t know, I had no idea, and I said, “Wow! I’m not a monster.”

[Aneris]: I also spoke with Mauro. He explained that intersex people are born with sexual characteristics that don’t fit the typical concepts of male or female bodies.

[Mauro Cabral]: Because either our chromosomes are different, or our gonads are different, or our genitals look different. In other words, there are many different ways to be an intersex person.

[Aneris]: It is estimated that almost 2 percent of the population is born with various types of intersex characteristics. These variations may be visible at birth, others become visible later—especially during puberty—and some may never become visible. Being intersex has no impact on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Currently, medicine no longer refers to these cases as “malformations” but as ” sexual development disorders.” The vocabulary has changed, but in practice, what still prevails are normalizing, cosmetic interventions like those performed on Candelaria, Mauro, and thousands of other intersex people around the world.

[Mauro]: We talk about normalizing interventions because the intention is to bring the bodies of intersex people as close as possible to an average body, let’s say male or female. And those interventions focus primarily on the genitals. That is, there are very few cases in which medicine intervenes for a proven medical purpose, that is, in response to a medical need. 

[Aneris]: Many of these interventions, which are usually performed in early childhood—of course, without the consent of the person involved—can leave irreversible physical consequences. These include infertility, pain, incontinence, loss of sexual desire, not to mention the psychological and emotional consequences.

Only nine countries restrict non-emergency interventions to modify the sexual characteristics of intersex children. There are also international recommendations to stop performing them because they can violate several human rights. Despite this, both doctors and parents generally continue to believe that interventions are the best option.

[Mauro]: Parents are terrified that their children will suffer. And they often fear things that are true. Because society discriminates, because body normativity does exist, because the danger of violence when someone realizes you have a different body does exist. If medicine says, “Well, this person is going to suffer; it’s better if we do it now; they won’t remember anything, and that way they won’t be discriminated against.” It’s very difficult to go against that.

[Aneris]: “She won’t remember anything,” and we’re not going to tell her either. Because secrecy was also, until recently, part of the medical recommendation. That way, they thought, the treatment would be more successful. The person would identify as female or male from childhood, and there would be no room for doubt. That same “we won’t talk about this again” Sandra heard that time. But in reality and in most cases, the truth eventually comes out…

[Mauro]: Many intersex people grew up without knowing what had been done to them, and had to go through a process of self-recognition, trying to reconstruct their own history from, let’s say, their body. Like someone using their own scars as ruins and trying to discover what was there before. And that’s a truly unbearable burden at times because the truth, of course, has elements that are liberating, but at the same time it requires dealing with pain that often seems to be incompatible with life. 

[Aneris]: The pain of knowing what was done to your body, but also the pain of knowing that everyone around you knew except you.

That’s why the intersex movement is fighting for the right of people who underwent surgery to know the truth. And so that, from now on, these types of practices will no longer be performed in early childhood, and that it’s up to the individual to decide about their own body in the future.

I asked Mauro whether in this case there isn’t also a chance that the person may complain that their parents did not have them operated as a child. The answer, he told me, isn’t easy: 

[Mauro]: That chance exists and is real. Of course, you may hate your parents because they didn’t operate on you when you were younger. The point is that if they operate on you when you’re a baby, there’s nothing you can do to reverse that. If the person lacks sensitivity, or is in pain, or suffers from any other type of negative consequences, it’s too late to be avoided. 

[Aneris]: On the other hand, if a person wants to have surgery as an adult, they can do so knowing what that decision entails. There’s no such thing as an ideal situation: growing up with a different body is difficult, but the truth is that surgeries create other kinds of differences. Because no matter how hard medicine tries to bring that body as close as possible to normal parameters, the scars will always remain.

After speaking with Mauro, Candelaria was able to understand many things about the surgeries she underwent, which left her with irreversible sequelae.

[Candelaria]: The therapist told me that genital mutilation can be compared to the post-traumatic stress of a person who went to war. I still experience that stress and post-traumatic shock to this day. I still feel it, I still suffer from it, and part of me still curses it.

[Aneris]: For a long time, Candelaria didn’t feel any pleasure during sex. And she had even resigned herself to the fact that it would be like that for the rest of her life. But one day, she experienced something different, like a kind of electricity running through her body. She thought she was having a cerebrovascular accident, a stroke. Then, when she went to the psychologist…

[Candelaria]: I described what I’d felt, and the therapist told me that, well, it wasn’t a stroke, but rather an orgasm. And every time I have an orgasm, it’s a victory for me. Every time I feel it, I still have that feeling of taking over the world.

[Aneris]: After several bureaucratic hurdles and repeated requests, Candelaria received an email at the end of 2021 notifying her that she could go see her court file, the one where they had requested a change of name and gender. Candelaria went to the court with a friend, and a few moments later, they handed her a file.

[Candelaria]: And it was incredible. The cover says, “Esteban Schamun.” It says the file number. And we went into the hallway. I remember trembling a lot.

[Aneris]: She opened the folder and saw all the documents from the process her parents had initiated to obtain a new birth certificate. The process had required medical examinations. She could picture the scene: the doctors examining her tiny baby body in a courtroom, feeling her genitals while she cried nonstop and her parents silently prayed for it all to be over soon.

There was also a copy of her medical records and several of the tests she’d had as a baby. Seeing all those documents together, condensed in one place, made her realize her parents were there too.

[Candelaria]: And I saw my mother. I saw my mother coming and going. And my father too, because my father had died when I was little. And well, you automatically canonize someone when they die, right? And then all the complaints landed on my mother, who was the one who was still alive. Well, I also pictured my father as an imperfect person, like we all are, but totally human, trying to save his daughter, his son, Esteban, and Candelaria. 

[Aneris]: She continued to look through the file and found a wood-colored envelope. She started shaking again.

[Candelaria]: And I put my hand in without looking, and I pulled out Esteban’s ID, and it didn’t have a photo, and it said, “Schamun Esteban. October 5, 1981.” Well, we scanned everything, I took everything, saved it, and returned it. And I felt like I had filed again something that belonged to me, and that right there and then, I had also claimed Esteban.

[Aneris]: In her final months, her mother had a sort of hospital set up at home. Three people cared for her in rotating shifts so she would never be alone. She was rarely lucid, but Candelaria still had time to tell her that she understood. That after learning the whole truth, the anger she had felt toward her for many years was gone. She had been a desperate mother, following the doctors’ advice to ensure her daughter had a life, so to speak, “as normal” as possible. She was able to tell her all that before she died.

As her mother slowly faded away, Candelaria sat by her bedside and talked with her. She managed to record some of those conversations:

[Archive soundbite]

[Candelaria]: What’s my name?

[Mother]: Too much. 

[Candelaria]: Yes, but what’s my name?

[Mother]: (inaudible) 

[Candelaria]: There were some very, very difficult moments, and other very loving moments, even moments of laughter that I was able to share with her. Others when she didn’t recognize me. In those days I had short hair, and my mother mistook me for a guy, and I loved that she mistook me for a guy, because somewhere in my head I thought, “Maybe she is seeing Esteban. This way she can leave in peace.” 

[Archive soundbite]

[Candelaria]: But if you have to name me, what would you call me?

[Mother]: (inaudible)

[Candelaria]: You called me Cande? 

[Mother]: Cande, yes, it can be. 

[Candelaria]:  It can be. Is my name Cande? 

[Mother]: Yes. 

[Candelaria]: Yes. 

[Candelaria]:  “Cande, come.” 

[Mother]: Yes.

[Candelaria]: Is that what you call me?

[Mother]: Yes.

[Candelaria]: I love you. 

[Candelaria and Mother]: Yesss.

[Daniel]: Candelaria currently lives with her wife, Jazmín, in a town of 600 inhabitants, 130 kilometers from Buenos Aires. She wrote her story in a book titled “Ese que fui” [The Boy I Was]. The photos she was so afraid of finding never turned up.

Aneris Casassus is a producer for Radio Ambulante and lives in Buenos Aires. This story was edited by Camila Segura and Luis Fernando Vargas. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. The sound design is by Andrés Azpiri and Ana Tuirán, with music by Ana.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramiírez, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa and Desirée Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast by Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

If you enjoyed this episode and want us to continue doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.