they tell of the struggles of trans people to exist

Histoire TV is broadcasting a documentary on Friday, May 17, which retraces 60 years of the struggle of transgender people to emerge from invisibility.

In the documentary A Trans History: 60 years of fighting to exist, broadcast on Histoire TV, Friday May 17 at 8:50 p.m., day of the fight against transphobia, director Pascal Petit traces through testimonies of trans women their struggles to simply exist, to no longer hide. Among these testimonies, that of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, née Jean-Pierre, who became a magazine leader under the name Bambi then a professor and writer for 30 years.

Transgender people have been invisible for a very long time. They were hiding, not allowed to be part of society. Which was not the case for Bambi, who thanks to cabaret was able to flourish because, in the 50s and 60s, to exist when you were trans, you had to be an artist. “It was the only way to get a place because with a male ID card you couldn’t show up anywhere. No job” she says. She also regrets that to live, some had to experience prostitution.

Returning to the Madame Arthur cabaret, then to the Carrousel de Paris, she took a liking to this life of glitter and stayed there for 20 years. After this career in entertainment, she began to return to her studies and became a professor of modern literature in 1974.

No one will be aware of their change in marital status for a simple reason, “I absolutely didn’t want to say it because it would have shocked me, she explains. The children wouldn’t have believed it and could have at one moment of anger called me ‘travelo’ or something like that. I would have had a hard time accepting.”

“What I wanted was to be everyone. So if people had known who I was, it was over. I wouldn’t have been everyone anymore.” “

Some are still uncomfortable with transidentity, which was also, for a time, considered a mental illness. A perception that the writer understands and which bears witness to what she was able to experience in her time. “Apart from my mother, everyone in the family ignored me overnight. Everyone absolutely condemned”.

That didn’t stop him from following his path, from ending up having surgery when the techniques were perfected, “I wasn’t afraid because I waited. I was wary of the result”, she specifies.

Today, things have evolved and she is letting the younger generation take up the issue of transidentity and the fight against transphobia. “I am no longer of the time we live in now. They do not need my advice. They know where they are. I am an ancestor. Yes, I fought, but it has been a long time since I fought not at all”, she concludes.

Watch this interview on video: