Georgina Epiayú, the trans Wayuu who fought for 45 years to be recognized as a woman

Georgina Epiayú searches with her thin, tanned hands inside her cloth bag. She impatiently fishes around until she finds and shows her ID card to the interviewer through the screen of her cell phone. She points to the “F” (for “Female”) that appears under the “sex” category on the document. She says that getting that letter on the ID took her 45 years of paperwork and insistence. With a meager income and a loneliness that makes her more vulnerable at her age, Epiayú, 72 and the first Wayuu woman to be registered as trans, has always prioritized her goal of being officially recognized as a woman.

“I keep myself strong because I need to work to be able to eat and survive,” says Epiayú in a pharmacy in Uribia, land of the Wayuu ethnic group, and known as the indigenous capital of Colombia. This municipality of La Guajira, on the northern coast of the country, is the closest city to her village, whose name she asks not to mention due to the transphobia prevailing in the region. The pharmacy where the interview is taking place is owned by a friend of Epiayú, who acts as a translator, because the interviewee prefers to speak in Wayuunaiki, despite also speaking Spanish. Meanwhile, the phone for the video call is provided by Beto Rosero, producer of the 2024 documentary Alma del desierto (Soul of the Desert), a film that records the journey of its protagonist to be recognized by the system as a woman, and shows the implications: the disapproval of her community, the abandonment of her siblings and her resulting delicate economic situation.

According to her birth certificate, Epiayú was born on December 31, 1952, under the name Jorge, and applied for her ID card as Georgina for the first time in 1975, at the age of 23. “I started my transition late, but this is what I will always be; I have always been like this,” she says in part of the film, which premieres commercially on January 30 in Brazil and May 1 in Colombia. She made more than five applications over almost five decades until, in 2021, she became the first Wayuu trans woman recognized by the National Registry of Colombia. The country made significant progress in recognizing the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community with Decree 1227 of 2015, which simplified the process for changing name and sex on identity documents by eliminating the need for judicial processes or medical diagnoses.

Economic precariousness

The struggle of this septuagenarian to obtain a public document is not limited to a cause of dignity, but represents an essential requirement to access her civil rights, including health insurance and food subsidies. This problem affects many members of the Wayuu, a binational people whose territory lies between Colombia and Venezuela, who are little familiar with state bureaucracy and who must face the language barrier. “Over eight years of filming, we saw that they have no documentation, they do not speak Spanish and they are at the mercy of some charitable soul who will help them with the paperwork or take them to the city and, with a bit of luck, advance in their process (...) The community is left to its own devices because they cannot express themselves in Spanish and that makes them marginalized from the system,” says the director of Alma del desierto, Mónica Taboada-Tapia.

Taboada-Tapia was that “charitable soul” for Epiayú, not only for her legal advice to obtain her identification, but for the financial support that she regularly provides. The donation, she says, is mainly used to stock her store, where she sells rice, sugar, candy, cookies, butter, matches, corn, hammocks and handmade backpacks. “What Monica sends is very helpful, with that I can survive and pay my expenses. Before that I had to come to Uribia to iron and wash. I had a good time during the holidays, but I have many needs,” says Epiayú in the interview, amid constant complaints about her economic situation.

She is dressed in a sun hat, a dress, earrings, necklaces and sneakers. She gives short answers, is closed to sensitive questions, and at one point in the interview she decides not to answer any more at all. That is why it is surprising when in the documentary she opens up and says that “she gave herself to one man”, who “built her a house, but then married” another woman. For director Taboada-Tapia, Epiayú is strong but tender: “She is a playful person, she likes to make jokes all the time. Very few people can bear what she has been through. Her most important quality is her admirable strength. She went from being a victim to a survivor. She gives hope to many people.”

The filmmaker met her in a television interview in 2016. She was so fascinated by her story that that same year they began production and shot for a week. In 2017, they shot for another seven days, and the remaining 31 days of filming were spread out between 2019 and 2022. From that time of work a close friendship was born between director and protagonist, with monthly contacts: “We always have a very fraternal conversation,” says the film director. In total, there were nine weeks of filming that resulted in an approach to a solitary life. Faced with the rejection of her environment and her brothers — “We don’t have any sisters. The only thing I will tell you is that we are three brothers,” says one of them in the film — Epiayú had to move from another ranchería, as the villages in that area of Colombia are called.

Transphobia in the community

The journey from one town to another through the endless desert of northern La Guajira that stretches into the horizon is the driving force that drives Alma del desierto forward. “There are many people from the LGBTQ+ community in the Wayuu nation, but I only know Georgina among the trans people. However, the community is somewhat sexist, the women in the community know this: there is machismo. And men can have all the women they can support,” says Taboada-Tapia. However, she insists that it is not a problem exclusive to the Wayuu, or even to Colombia, but that it affects all of Latin America. “The speeches of multimillionaires and new rulers who are determined to attack the trans community help to build transphobia. I do not understand this populist wave campaigning against the rights of these people,” she laments.

Inclusion is not, however, the biggest problem for the Wayuu nation, chosen by current President Gustavo Petro to be the symbol of his relationship with grassroots organizations. 81% of people in the community have at least one unmet basic need and only 22% have electricity, according to a 2021 report by the National Administrative Department of Statistics of Colombia. The scarcity of drinking water, child malnutrition, lack of governance and pollution are the main causes. Regarding the latter, the Ranchería River that flows into the Caribbean appears in Alma del desierto, contaminated by rampant coal mining in the area. “They are benefiting at our expense because they are in our territory,” says one of the neighbors in the film.

Epiayú feels that her community and herself are represented by the images she sees in the documentary. She says that it makes her “nostalgic to see her life reflected.” After obtaining her identity card as a woman, her next goal is to find enough courage to leave her animals on the ranch so she can be present at the screenings in the capital where her story will be told.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition