Trans population of Puerto Rico, as of the most available study (2018), says that the LGBTQIA+community is only 3% of the total population of Puerto Rico and from that percentage 2,061 are transgender women, and I form part of that statistic.
The trans experience in Puerto Rico alone is one that is difficult navigating different hurdles of getting HRT, recognition of family members or state and problems in the lgbtqia+ past were no different when it came to the academic setting of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. But as recently amazing strides have been made, the program is called “Calidad de Vida”, said program is dedicated to improving the quality of life of all students of UPRM.
By the time I discovered this program I was recently “out”; it seemed to be the perfect way of coming out to the world and to start making changes. However, the journey within the different programs responding and reacting to this change still makes the process all the more difficult than it already is. The following experience is described from the point of view of a transgender woman, she was one of the first to try out the new program when it started out.
The change starts with your preferred name. The first visit allows you to change your email name, to said preferred name. It is important to know that this change is an internal one, only in the UPRM system. If the change of name is done legally, it is important to notify the Admissions department so not only your email changes, but also your future diploma.
It is important to NOTIFY these changes yourself, because you might have problems accessing portals like the UPR portal, the UPRM portal, and Moodle. In my experience what happened was two things: the old account with the dead name, in some shape or form, deactivated and there was an error to synchronize the change to the new account. The name change can be handled effectively by deactivating the old account to activate the new one. I spoke to my professor about it and he was very supportive through this situation and offered to talk to management to see what he can do. He also looked me up in his courses and my old account at the time and I still was enrolled there. So lucky, my academic efforts were not lost.
I had to talk to CTI to fix this issue, I still had to reach “Calidad de vida” and the general student attorney to get the CTI team to make the changes and make awareness of the program. They notified me that they were not made aware of it before, which is concerning since this is a program that is currently active.
In all these instances I got the recognition only after having to talk about myself, the best case scenario or in the worst case scenario, use recourse in the university. It is troublesome to find out that something made to help marginalized groups is not as spread out.
With this experience of being a trans woman, it makes me wonder if other trans people had it worse? Better? Was my own nagging and using the resources provided made it so others after me do not have to deal with the unpleasantness I have gone through? I wish to believe so. I must believe that my own presence and my actions to better my own conditions set waves of positive change to my LGBTQIA+ community in hopes that their experience will be a little more pleasant.