“Joy cannot be controlled, it takes you by surprise. […] It wove itself into me without warning. It anchors me to the land and makes me certain of my existence. […] The virus will take me out, maybe. But to all those who wished for it, I can now say: ‘You will not take my joy’.“
For over 15 years, Giovanna Rincón, a transgender activist from Bogotá, Colombia, has been instrumental in advancing the rights of the immigrant, trans, sex worker, and HIV-positive communities in Europe. In 2010, she founded Acceptess-T, a Paris-based organization that supports trans people with housing, healthcare, legal procedures, and financial support. Rincón and her comrades also fight to change harmful legislation and seek justice for murdered trans sex workers.
In January 2026, she released her autobiography, Moi, Giovanna, Une enfance trans à Bogotá (I, Giovanna, A Trans Childhood in Bogotá), co-written with her friend Stéphanie Malphettes, a former journalist and documentarian.
Malphettes first met Rincón in 2017, while conducting research for a documentary on HIV. Seven years later, Giovanna dictated her life story to Stéphanie, who turned it into a book. Malphettes opens the book’s preface by recounting her first exposure to sex work as a child, when her parents drove through the Bois de Boulogne, a vast forest in the northwestern suburbs of Paris known for the sex trade. Her parents dubbed the workers “blue birds,” a name that Giovanna takes on when describing her own time in the industry.
Although their friendship and collaboration are apparent in the book, Malphettes’ preface offers a strange summary of Rincón’s life: “Giovanna is born in Bogotá in 1969. She has a masculine name, a boy’s body and the certainty of being a girl. At 12 years old, she runs away from home. She comes back six months later, a lover on her arm.”
This quote also appears on the book’s back cover and has been reprised in multiple articles. Some restate its premise by referring to Giovanna as a “girl born in a boy’s body” or a “woman assigned male at birth.” This framing, along with the limited media attention surrounding this book, assumes a lack of awareness and interest in trans experiences among the French public. Rincón’s life story is introduced as a novelty rather than a tale of a child’s struggle and triumph over patriarchy, poverty, queerphobia, and “Freddy”—the nickname given to HIV after A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger.
In the book’s conclusion, Rincón writes that she tells her life story in the context of her activism.
In recent years, France has seen sparser mainstream trans representation and media discussion compared to the United States or United Kingdom. The few examples there are seem to introduce transness to their audience for the first time. Additionally, the anti-trans rhetoric that is now central to Western fascist movements has been trickling into the French far-right toolkit. In 2024, pseudo-feminist grifters Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern were widely received on television and radio to promote their transphobic book Transmania. Rincón’s book, on the other hand, has remained largely ignored by the mainstream press, obscuring Giovanna’s transformative role in her community’s struggle.
Except for Part 1, which is set in 1990, when Giovanna is diagnosed with HIV, the book’s narrative is mostly chronological, spanning from 1974 to 1993. Malphettes and Rincón choose to open with her diagnosis because it was a turning point in Giovanna’s life. In the book’s conclusion, Rincón writes that she tells her life story in the context of her activism, her “first twenty years disappear behind HIV.” The second part of the book, then, becomes an attempt to bring her younger years back into focus, depicting a girl who continuously insists on drawing her own trajectory in life.
From a very young age, Giovanna was faced with extreme poverty, her father’s violence, queerphobia, and child sexual abuse. She became sure of her womanhood at five years old and quickly learned few would accept it. Despite these barriers, she carved out moments to safely be herself. The first to know her chosen name was Paola, another closeted trans girl whom she met in her pre-teen years at the shoemaking workshop that her father forced her to work in. Paola took Giovanna to her friend Yuri’s home, a magical haven where their group of young “travestis” dressed up together and danced to records from the New York City ballroom scene. They even dared to go outside as themselves on Halloween night, which gave Giovanna a taste of what her life as a woman could be.
Through enchanting afternoons filled with feather boas, kohl eyeliner, and Irene Cara’s hit song “Fame,” Giovanna became determined to transition. One afternoon, she found a gossip magazine, Vea, in her father’s workshop, with transgender model Roberta Close on the cover. In her interview with the periodical, Close explained that she took birth control pills to physically transition. Giovanna excitedly showed the magazine to her friends and suggested they do the same. They immediately tried to talk her out of it, downplaying their dress-up afternoons as mere play, and warned her of the real danger of being visibly queer in 1980s Bogotá. Against her friends’ advice, Giovanna decided to tread her own path and began by stealing pills from her mother and the pharmacy.
This self-realization was unfortunately interrupted by Giovanna’s first love and long-time abuser, Manuel. They met when she was 12, and he was 20, in a secret queer community in Bogotá’s La Candelaria district where Giovanna found refuge after running away from home. Instead of encouraging her to break free from her family’s transphobic violence, Manuel convinced her to return home with him, in the Centenario neighborhood, and work in his carpentry shop. For years, the two were entwined in an abusive relationship as he coaxed her into stopping her transition. Malphettes and Rincón write: “Month after month, through tenderness and persuasion, he had molded the boy of his dreams. A gift to himself.”
Poverty is an antagonist that she defies throughout the book.
This period of Giovanna’s life exemplifies the constant compromise she has had to strike between her freedom and her precarity. Poverty is an antagonist that she defies throughout the book, starting as young as nine years old, when she washed potatoes for a woman in the local market in order to pay for the bus to and from school. Her mother made a meager income, and her father’s drinking made him financially unreliable, which caused the family to move constantly, from Bogotá’s El Libertador neighborhood, to El Centenario, through several tiny rooms, back to El Centenario, and finally to San Blas. Giovanna picked up a myriad of odd jobs to feed their family of five: she worked as a sandal maker, built furniture, and discovered a passion for hairdressing.
With Manuel’s help, she started a hair salon at 15 and quickly became her family’s main breadwinner. Paradoxically, this pedophilic and controlling relationship allowed her to find the key to her freedom. Running the business earned her respect from her father, allowed her to restart her transition, and introduced her to the many trans women who became her employees and friends. One of them, Raquel, encouraged her to follow in her footsteps and move to Europe to do sex work, a more lucrative occupation than any job she had access to in Colombia.
The only true loss of faith in Giovanna’s story seems to be the moment she was diagnosed with HIV at the age of 20—seven years before the discovery of antiretroviral therapy. In a discreet Red Cross clinic in Bogota’s Ciudad Salitre neighborhood, a nurse apologetically gave her three years to live. Giovanna became obsessed with her imminent death. She describes an all-consuming terror that clouded her every thought. The virus’ personification, Freddy, lived inside of her, slept under her bed, and breathed down her neck as a constant reminder of the ticking clock. She was forced to hide her diagnosis from all but two friends to avoid being completely ostracized at a time when men on television were openly threatening to murder HIV-positive people.
That was when Paola rescued her. She reminded Giovanna of her fighting spirit. As they sat by a lake after leaving the clinic, Paola pointed at the swimming goldfish and said:
“You see this one, the clever one that’s going faster than the others? That’s what you need to do. Move, live. Leave your mind in peace. Move like that fish, like you always have. You’re not sick.
-And I won’t die?
-No, Freddy will die.
She was right: Giovanna lived. In 1993, after living two days longer than the nurse had predicted, Giovanna heeded Raquel’s advice and flew to Europe to start anew. The book ends with her tearful departure and hopes to prosper as a sex worker.
In the book’s conclusion, Giovanna recounts how she worked in the sex industry in Italy and France, alongside other HIV-positive migrant women like her, for years. These experiences built her activist spirit and inspired her to create Acceptess-T, which has become an example across Europe of all-around support for trans people. Her story is a gift and a guide for future generations on how to survive the struggle.
All quotes from the book cited in this review are unofficial translations by the reviewer.
Ito Choho is a writer, filmmaker, and English teacher who is passionate about social movements. A former New Yorker, she is currently living near Paris.