Born in the village of Vallibona, province of Castellón, Florencio became a symbol of defiance against both political oppression and rigid gender roles.

[1] With life proving harsh, Florencio began working at a young age, tending the family's sheep and goats[4] Due to his remote upbringing, he received little formal education, attending school briefly just long enough to take his First Communion.

[1] A family friend, aware of the potential difficulties Florencio might face in fulfilling military service due to his physical condition, advised his father to have him registered as female in the civil registry.

Despite being assigned female at birth and being socially forced to wear women's clothing, Florencio always identified more closely with male roles.

[3] On the morning of the burning, the Civil Guard, having learned of Florencio's intersex condition and driven by nothing more than their curiosity, subjected him to a humiliating encounter, forcing him to strip, as at this point they had no reason to suspect he had any involvement with the Maquis.

[3] This series of events left him with a deep sense of rage and injustice, prompting him to join the Maquis as both a political statement and a way to align with his own identity, fully embracing a male role within the resistance.

In his own words: Jo ja havia volgut presentar-me a la guerra voluntari, amb els rojos, per veure si em podia fer amb la documentació d'home, perquè jo anava pel carrer i tots deien: mira, si pareix un home.

Spanish diplomats like José Félix de Lequerica facilitated this alignment, lobbying effectively in Washington and emphasizing Franco's strategic value in the Cold War context.

[11] These developments left the Spanish Maquis increasingly isolated, their efforts diminished to a lost cause against a dictatorship now legitimized internationally.

Under these circumstances, Florencio joined the guerrillas of the XXIII Sector of the Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante y Aragón (AGLA), led by Jesús Caelles Aymerich, known as Carlos el Catalán.

Supporting the Maquis could lead to imprisonment, torture or death, while resisting them often resulted in raids, making it impossible to convince the Civil Guard that such robberies weren't staged to cover missing resources.

They reported that Teresa Pla Meseguer, La Pastora, was, in fact, a man whose "defective" genital condition classified him as a case of 'male pseudohermaphroditism.

'[18]Transcript of the report: Primera.— El individuo reconocido pertenece al sexo masculino.Segunda.— La constitución de sus órganos genitales es defectuosa, presentando un hipospadias perineal y un escroto bífido que, junto a las reducidas dimensiones del pene, hacen que sea clasificable entre los casos de pseudohermafroditismo masculino.Tercera.— Dado su sexo gonadal, no debe ser recluido en la cárcel de mujeres por ser peligrosa su convivencia con individuos del sexo contrario al suyo.

[19] First.— The individual in question belongs to the male sex.Second.— The constitution of his genital organs is defective, presenting a perineal hypospadias and a bifid scrotum, which, along with the reduced size of the penis, make him classifiable among cases of male pseudohermaphroditism.Third.— Given his gonadal sex, he should not be confined in a women's prison due to the danger of cohabiting with individuals of the opposite sex.Following this, he was transferred to the men's prison to await his first trial.

However, Villar Raso transformed the work into a novel, adding his own passages and emphasizing sensational aspects such as Florencio’s intersex condition and alleged sexual behavior in guerrilla camps.

[27] Published in 1978 under the title La Pastora: el maqui hermafrodita, the book included 32 pages allegedly copied from Vinuesa’s manuscript, prompting a plagiarism lawsuit.

[...] imagine if his wife or his own daughters were to read something like that..." (Florencio is expressing his outrage here over one of the most egregious fabricated sexual encounters in Villar's narrative, in which he is depicted as masturbating Francisco, alias Rubio, to death after the latter was shot.