BarcelonaMany of us were moved by Ronaldinho’s Barça. The Brazilian’s smile was commendable, and his football returned the illusion to Barcelona and, why not say it, also to a large part of the Catalans. Who also fell in love with football thanks to Ronaldinho’s move to Barcelona was Valentina Berr. Back then, she was just a child who hadn’t yet started the process of changing her sex, although she had already felt within herself for a long time that the gender patterns in which society was trying to pigeonhole her were not they fit him “I also wanted to play like Ronaldinho, but over time I think what I liked most about him was how he built his identity around football, from the joy and passion that characterized him.”
Since then, football has accompanied him in his life, until the end of this last season. Last June 28, coinciding with the International LGBTI+ Pride Day, Valentina said enough. The first federated trans Catalan footballer – and the second from Spain – announced that she was quitting to preserve her mental health. He did so after a successful season with CE Europe, with which he had achieved promotion to the second highest state women’s category. But the pressure pushed her to make a decision “as difficult as it is necessary”: “I don’t hang up my boots, they hang them up. I couldn’t take the panic and anxiety attacks that I was suffering more and more often in the last months”.
Since then, he has not tired of giving interviews. All over the planet. There are days when she ends up exhausted, but she believes that conveying her case can help to try to change certain patterns of society, both outdated and established. In fact, it has a project for the dissemination and normalization of trans and LGTBI+ realities called the answer to everything, based on podcasts, training talks and educational content. “Trans people often have to put up with uncomfortable questions in contexts in which they should not occur. Part of the idea of the project is that if someone wants to know better what it means to be trans and ask us questions, that there is a appropriate space to do it,” he explains.
Valentina’s speech was forged after having to overcome many hurdles due to the fact that she was born with genitals associated with men. “For a long time I felt things in me that did not fit within the gender patterns in which they wanted me to believe that I should identify myself, but it was when I was 20 years old – now he is 30 – when I began to discover the first trans referents, feminist readings…”. Throughout this process, football has been part of his life. First, from the age of 10 to 14 he played in mixed school teams. “At the age of 14 I had to go to federated football and I had to play with boys, because the options for women’s football were very few. I did not feel comfortable in men’s football, it is a space in which masculinity is magnified and not he fit in – he remembers -. Notice that you hardly see homosexual or more feminized footballers, it’s still a taboo.”
The debut as a trans footballer
He felt she wasn’t part of it and folded in less than two years. “Even though I was still connected to football, because I love watching games, from different teams.” It was the first time he stopped playing in a federated form, but he would return years later, when he had already started the procedures to change his gender. At the age of 25, she became the first trans soccer player to participate in a women’s soccer match as a federation in 2018, playing with the second senior team of Terrassa femení. It was a milestone with so much resonance that it overwhelmed her, but it also meant having overcome many barriers to achieve it: both bureaucratic and ignorance of the clubs. He called international federations and states and had to collect a lot of documentation.
The same international states that, with their pressure with control measures, have contributed to the resignation of Valentina, tired of feeling “permanently suspicious” when meeting the testosterone limits. The footballer born in Ripollet criticizes the pressure she has suffered when she was “constantly” required to comply with the levels so that she would not be banned from playing or harming her team. “Levels that many non-trans female peers can easily exceed by a long shot.” This added to other episodes of insults (even media articles considering her a danger) that have finished wearing her down. Despite everything, Valentina has great respect for women’s football and the diversity that defines it. And he gets excited when he talks about football. A passion of which unfortunately there are those who want to deprive it.
