Photo: Frederico Martins for Vogue Portugal
This is Paulo, who is also Paulinha. With the careful eye of Frederico Martins and the production of Nelly Gonçalves, Paulinha’s story came to light in Vogue Portugal in 2020. It is one that deserves to be told slowly, but always with a plumb line, because the stories of others are far too valuable to be cast to the wind.
Paulinha was born in S. João da Madeira, a town with a deep-rooted tradition in the footwear industry, where, funnily enough, she works on a production line. Paulo Santos is known as Paulinha, more precisely Paulinha de Arrifana, where she lives. She was born male, but has never identified with her birth sex. In fact, ever since she was a child, she felt different and in a body that wasn’t her own. It was a doctor who explained the meaning of transsexuality to Paulinha’s parents at an early age.
We can say, without being in her shoes, that life has not been easy. A small town that didn’t recognise or understand what it was like to be born in a body that wasn’t your own, where people made fun of you and there were stories of violence and incomprehension. Like Paulinha, there are hundreds of stories of those who have been violated and humiliated for not conforming to the usual codes.
Speaking to Vogue, Frederico Martins, the author of the editorial published at the time, said that “these stories are usually associated with people who are in the media, some of them are even famous, they are more or less public figures, but Paulo is an anonymous man from a small village”.
In other cases, perhaps, it might have been easier to move out to a large urban area. But this wasn’t the case. Frederico explains that Paulinha “is a woman in a man’s body. Others would have packed up and moved to a big city, but not Paulinha: she stayed in the village and still lives with her parents. She must be almost 50 years old, she’s been through a lot, she’s endured a lot, she’s suffered a lot, but she’s never left her hometown”.
But this story makes us ask another question: What does it mean to be a woman? The heated discussions on social media about what defines a woman are vast and vague, and all have one thing in common: many don’t know what they’re talking about because very few feel they were born in the wrong body.
Science already has something to say about this, but what we learn from Paulinha’s story is that being a woman goes far beyond the limits of one’s birth sex.
