Part II: Happier as a Woman • Dr. Martina Ramirez

(Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, Loyola Marymount University || CA USA)

(2/3) “I have a biography coming out in October. It’s called ‘Happier as a Woman.’ At first glance it’s a trans narrative — it’s about me. But it’s about a lot of other things. My friends in the social sciences talk about intersectional identities — I’m first gen, low income, Latina, I transitioned from male to female, I’m lesbian. I have a challenging backstory beyond that. I grew up in Pomona which was a segregated city. There were two Catholic churches, one for white people, the other for brown people. My parents never finished high school — they had to make money to support their families. My dad was ex-military from WWII — when he came back from the war he got his real estate license. They adopted me at nine months — by that time they owned a couple homes, business was going well. Two years later my dad became the campaign manager for a Mexican American dentist running for city council. He didn’t win, but he got a lot of votes. My dad was identified as a ‘problem’ because he was trying to bring brown people into neighborhoods where they weren’t ‘supposed to be’ — in Southern California there were plenty of housing covenants against brown folks. They had someone accuse him of embezzlement and he was incarcerated. He lost his businesses, our home. When my dad came out of prison he was picking oranges in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. We lived in a garage for a while, a car. My life was about adversity. Racism for me was never theoretical, it was real-world. I knew I was trans from the time I was a kid, but I lived in a conservative household with no health insurance to transition, so I learned, like so many other things, that I was going to have to make do. I knew whatever happened in my life, whether I transitioned or not, I had to do some justice work in the world. So my life has been a story of bringing goodness to people who are marginalized, because I saw what marginalization did to my dad. I’ve had a complex life — more than just this gender journey. That’s why my colleague thought my story would make a good book.”

Link to biography: bit.ly/happier-as-a-woman