Living on the costa

The Estepona Ana Hellen Mena is an intersex person who has gone through the difficult situation of living and expressing herself as a woman after years of having “lived in a fictitious character, who was Sergio” and discovering that she had female organs with a masculine appearance, a process that has not been exempt from harassment, rejection and frustration, but which the young woman has known how to face and empower herself to show herself to the world as she is and feels, a female.

Discovering her true identity over time has been one of the achievements of this 28-year-old, who at 9 he thought he was “homosexual””, with 11 she had “the first symptoms of her period”, with 21 thought he was a “transsexual guy” until you define your real situation. It is a case of intersex, which is “synonymous with hermaphroditism”, he has reported.

The decision of initiate a “transition” process It began in 2016 in the Endocrinology Unit of the Hospital Civil de Málaga, where he underwent various tests for “hormonation”, although he was always clear that he did not want to undergo surgery. An ultrasound gave the key, and found “remains of the cervix, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and even mammary glands and mums” in Hellen’s internal organs.

“I have a clitoris developed in the form of a micropenis that can measure between 3 and 4 centimeters and erect between 7 and 8. The scrotum is the fused labia but I don’t have testicles but a lump of fat”, he commented. These internal “deformations” are due to the intake of “birth control pills” by her parent, who “have many hormones,” she has assessed.

Face the mirror and accept your body was one of the main challenges that the young woman faced: “I cried like the most and I began to put all the insults I received on my body with mascara and I began to laugh, because what I was doing was overcoming that fear”, pointed out therapy mode. “This thing that I have between my legs is not mine. I felt empty, crying, depressed, moving away from the people I loved the most and reproaching them for something that was really my fears and my insecurity. I didn’t feel complete. When I want to change, it is when I begin to love myself and to see all the defects that my body has and I turn them into beautiful things, which are unique, ”she added.

The determination came later, in 2017, when in a family WhatsApp group he reported that “what he saw in the mirror was not me, that Sergio had to vanish to make way for Ana Hellen.” In 2018 I start the process of “transition to hormonal and lose the few boy hormones I had” when thinking that I was transsexual. The first thing was to choose the new name, Ana for her grandmother, and Hellen for her sister’s choice, which was a “release”. After numerous tests found out she was intersexspecifically of the “variant chromosomes XX 46”, related to “people who have ovaries, female organs and male appearance”, and which according to their doctor, is “the only one in Spain”.

“I have spent 22 years of my life thinking that Sergio was and he never existed, that he was homosexual and I never have been and going through a childhood in which he should not have suffered bullying”, Mena has recapitulated about her evolutionary process after learning that she is intersex. “YouI have to deny my whole life for 22 years because I feel that I have lived a lie and I have to start filling in all those years, and I have come to the conclusion that I have lived in a fictitious character, which was Sergio, who has completely marked my life with whom I have learned to be wrong , to fall down and get up on my own, and to be strong in the transformation to Hellen”, she added.

At that time, “I tried to live everything that I had not experienced in two years when I did not know that I was a woman like go to clubs, dress as a woman, put on some makeup, put on some heels or a bag, it was not healthy”. Thus, he has valued that once “I mature emotionally with myself, that’s when people took me more seriously.” She now looks to the future and claims to be “an empowered, strong, alive woman” after transmuting by “that evolution of being empty and trying to fill myself with the comments and what people think, to fill me with myself and what people think gives me a little more the same”. The greatest gift, to be treated as “her”.