Growing up in Cuba, Maritxa Vidal remembers feeling like she didn’t fit into the society she was being raised in, nor the part it expected her to play. Then, everyone knew her as the second son of the Vidal family, she says. But she new that identity didn’t represent her.
“I was always playing with the girls, when we’d get in lines I’d go into the girl’s line and the teachers would grab me and put me in the boy’s line,” remembers Vidal. “Of course at that time I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how to process it.”
In 1967, when Vidal was 9 years old, her family moved to the United States. While struggling to adapt to a new country, Vidal, 60, was also fighting a battle within herself. Confusion over her gender identity and society’s expectations plunged Vidal into depression at 13.
“I felt caged in a body that wasn’t mine. I identified with everything feminine,” she says. “I didn’t know what a transgender was, the first time I heard that term was when I was 16 years old, it was when I head of Los Cotorritos de Puerto Rico.”
Los Cotorritos were a group of male drag queens and performers, Vidal remembers. After attending a Cotorritos, she identified immediately with them: she was born to be a woman, she felt like a woman.
The next year, at the age of 17 Vidal began taking hormones to start her body transition, without her parents’ knowledge. Fearing it would hurt her parents to see her transition, she left home.
Despite the challenges her identity has caused her, Vidal has always pushed forward.
“I’ve been lucky to have met amazing people in my 60 years”, Vidal says while walking the Paseo Boricua, in the Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood, where she’s a well-known figure.
But the support has not insulated her from hate. Just this year, after a Black Lives Matter protest downtown, Vidal says she was approached at a CTA stop by three white men with swastika bands on their arms, who began harassing her after reading the protest signs she carried.
“One of them told me he could turn me into dog food by throwing me in front of the train,” she recalls. “He said I was a disgrace because I was born a man and I feel like a woman.”
Though Vidal has never been one to keep quiet, in that moment she says she feared for her life.
“We transgenders leave our homes everyday to work, to make a living, like everyone else. The only difference is that we cannot be guaranteed that we’ll make it back home at the end of the day,” she says
That’s why Vidal and fellow trans woman Maya Lozano started a Chicago chapter of the national organization TransLatin@, in 2011. The trans-advocacy organization has chapters in 27 states. According to Vidal, the Chicago chapter focuses on immigrant trans men and women, and the undocumented.
“What I try to do with TransLatin@ is educate the community,” Vidal says. “We aren’t a danger, we aren’t clowns, we aren’t sick people. We’re simply people that have wishes and feelings that don’t go with the body we’re born in.”
Vidal also holds a leadership role at Vida/SIDA, a sexual health clinic supported by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center.
Her community work led to her enshrinement in the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame, in 2016. But for Vidal, such awards aren’t the main motivation to fight for equality.
“We’re all brothers, humans. We all laugh, cry, we have dreams and aspirations, so we have to help each other,” says Vidal, who adds she won’t stop fighting until all citizens receive equal protection under law, respect and a dignified life.
