Breathe
By Emilia Gonzalez, CEO of Serpa Cloud.
I am Emilia Gonzalez, I am a woman, mother, wife, entrepreneur, founder and CEO of my own startup, but 3 years ago I was none of those things, because I am a transgender person.
I remember being in the schoolyard when I was 6 years old, I didn't care about the screams of the children running, nor the mockery or violence of my classmates, because while I was sitting in the middle of the yard, my mind tried to explain to me why I was not able to understand what was happening outside myself. The only thing that took me out of my own confinement was when the teachers took us to the bathroom, that moment not only caused me anxiety for exposing myself in front of the other children, but also because the rejection of my own body overflowed me so much that I lost control, and without wanting to, I returned to my mental confinement. Growing up in a Catholic school for men, where there were not only elementary school children, but most of them were teenagers middle and high school students, marked not only my childhood but also my adult life, because that school would become the analogy of my own history and of a society full of inequalities. And those same situations have been repeated over the years in different forms, realities and contexts.
I have more than 10 years of experience in the IT (Information Technology) industry, with no education, no money, with obvious lack of social skills (due to my neuro divergences). The way I entered the ecosystem was a stroke of luck. The hard part was not starting from scratch at work, nor learning something I didn't know at all, it was to face every day the fact that there was something wrong with me, the constant criticism of my ways of interacting, forcing me to have behaviors typical of a toxic masculinity in order to be accepted by a team dominated by men, having to adapt to live in a constant social repression. However, the first huge challenge I had was to repress the emotional outburst when they humiliated me or someone else by talking about penises and all their allegories.
The second biggest challenge was my own transition, I hated myself for all the violence I absorbed and normalized, giving up a whole idea of what life was out of my mind became a duel, I faced the fear of being abandoned, rejected and humiliated. When I came out of the closet, the aggression of my work team, the ones I considered my best friends, reached limits that were not to be crossed and I only thought of suicide as a way out.
That is the society we live in, where we normalize gender violence and reporting it is almost as traumatizing as the act itself. A society that systematically revictimizes. The lack of a culture of inclusion is palpable, many times aggression and violence come from a lack of knowledge of diversity. There are cases, like mine, where we ignore our own intersectionalities due to lack of information.
Three years into my transition, I have been blessed to have grown more than ever in every way: I am immensely happy, my family dynamics have improved, I have had great job opportunities, I have made lifelong friends. But just as it is important to talk about the good, it is a responsibility to talk about the challenges that a transition entails. In my case I have faced the need to overcome unconscious biases, proving that being a woman does not make me make worse decisions, besides continuing to face social rejection and sexual harassment in the street and in public spaces.
Today, at the age of 32, I'm building Serpa Cloud, a platform that empowers millions of developers to publish applications in the cloud in minutes, while at the same time creating tools as the basis for a collaborative technology community that becomes a safe space to learn and share innovation. But entrepreneurship is such a big risk, even for people with resources, that doing it without an economic or social network is an almost unthinkable privilege. My case is really an anomaly in the data, almost a statistical inevitability, and that is that according to Pitchbook only 2% of private equity-backed companies are founded exclusively by women, but when we try to get the same data on trans intersectionality, the only statistics they talk about are: the percentage of social rejection and violence, as well as HIV and mortality rates.
That is why I am grateful, because on the road to entrepreneurship, for the first time I have found people with whom I identify and great allies, such as 500 LatAm, who believed in me and my entrepreneurship, supporting me as part of Batch 18 of its program Somos Lucha. Although the startup ecosystem currently has a well-developed openness to diversity, there is still a long way to go. As a society we need to create visibility about gender identity, trans reality and inclusion in order to reclaim our right to self-perception and normalize the existence of diverse realities. At the same time, the creation of communities can help us generate allies along the way, creating a network effect that positively impacts the creation of an inclusive culture for new generations. For my part, speaking out and telling my story is a way to inspire others who do not yet know or do not have the courage to allow themselves to live their own reality.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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