Dania Gutiérrez was born on a Wednesday, June 20, 1973, in
Mexico City. At that time, she was registered under the name
of David as that was her parents' choice and in accordance
to her biologically assigned gender. However, it is until
July 2009 when Dania is born to society not because
of a fancy or eccentricity, but as result of years of personal
work. All that work made Dania accept herself as a transgender
person.
Great part of that personal work took place during her graduate
studies at the University
of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). While working towards her
Doctor's degree, Dania received counseling at UIC
Counseling Center, and was an active member of PRIDE,
which is the LGBT
student organization at UIC. During the seven years that Dania
spent in Chicago she made great strides in coming to terms
with her identity as a transgender individual and then she
started her transition process.
In 2005, she returns to Mexico City to start a research career in the area of bioengineering. She obtained a posdoctoral fellowship at IIMAS, UNAM, and in May 2006 she got a position as an assistant professor at Cinvestav Monterrey. However, it was until July 2009 that, after achieving the necessary professional and personal maturity, she decides to complete her transition and start living full-time as a woman.
Dania has found support, acceptance, strenght, and love from her wife, family, and friends. She has also found the inspiration and has been influenced by people like Lynn Conway, Deidre McCloskey, Andrea James, Donna Rose, and Julia Serano. As well as them, Dania wishes to help in eliminating prejudice towards transexual and transgender people by sharing her life experience and by her activism work. Now Dania hopes to see the day when "the unceasing search to uncover the cause of transsexuality [comes to an end, as such search] is designed to keep transsexual gender identities in a perpetually questionable state, thereby ensuring that cissexual gender identities continue to be unquestionable [Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, pp. 187-188]". Dania has never considered herself a person trapped in the wrong body, but a person trapped in the wrong society.
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