She has the soft, welcoming tone of someone who knows how to listen, but when she speaks about neuroscience, she does so with surgical precision and a confidence that leaves no room for doubt. Emilia Redolar Ripoll (Teruel, 1974), a tenured professor at the UOC and director of the Cognitive NeuroLab at the same university, has dedicated her career to deciphering how the brain makes us human. In Lo que somos bajo la piel (Destino), her latest book, science is explained through Almudena, a trans woman whom we accompany from childhood and who, as the author acknowledges, is her own mirror. Redolar combines science and testimony to remind us that the brain is also biology, that identity cannot be reduced to genitals, and that diversity is the most natural way life has of expressing itself.

It is always appreciated when a film doesn't lecture you. This applies to any film, of course, but it is especially relevant when dealing with works that touch on social issues. Iván & Hadoum, in this sense, gets into many tricky situations right from its premise: Iván is a young trans man who falls in love with a colleague from Morocco at the fruit and vegetable greenhouse where they both work in Almeria. That is to say, the film touches on gender, sexual identity, class, and race. But none of these is the narrative axis. In any case, class ends up having more weight, because the friction between the two characters ends up being work-related (Iván has a complacent attitude towards the bosses; Hadoum is combative). Be that as it may, the opera prima as a director by Ian de la Rosa is not about that either: it's about the moment when two people, regardless of their identity, converge until they diverge, like any other pair of human beings in the first stages of falling in love.

Valentina Berr has decided to give up. The first trans federated football player in Catalonia – and the second in Spain – announced this Tuesday, on International LGBTI+ Pride Day, that she is abandoning federated football "to preserve her mental health". The 28-year-old player of CE Europa, a Barcelona team with which this season had achieved promotion to the Spanish second division, explained that she is giving up football reluctantly. She does so because of the pressures of playing as a trans woman: "I'm not hanging up my boots; they hanging them up for me. I could no longer stand the panic and anxiety attacks I had increasingly been suffering in recent months," she said in a statement.