The National University of La Plata gave this Monday a mention of “distinguished graduate“From a Ph.D. to the first trans woman to earn that graduate degree from a public university.
Claudia Vasquez Haro is president of the NGO Otrans Argentina and got the PhD in Social Communication with his thesis titled “Iswallow dentities from an epistemology of dispossession: the charapas“.
Although there are two trans men who received their PhDs, Vázquez Haro is the first transvestite femininity to obtain that degree at a public university.
“I am very happy for this distinction that recognizes an academic production around the systematization and conceptualization of transvestite and trans identities. It is a work that includes a strong critique of the academic production of these spaces of knowledge. My thesis talks about transepistemicide of the spaces for the production of knowledge that are the universities, where truths are validated, “said Télam Vázquez Haro after the act where she was distinguished as the best graduate of a doctorate.
The graduate reflected on what it meant growing up in an “adult-centered and heteronormative” society in which “we have not even had stories that talk about us, our entire primary and secondary school passed with a void in our existence,” she said.
“I am very happy for this distinction that recognizes an academic production around the systematization and conceptualization of transvestite and trans identities.”Claudia Vasquez Haro
“Being the first female doctor is a huge challenge, and it show that we are part of the academic production, that we occupy university spaces that have historically been forbidden “, he remarked.
He stressed that currently “there are seven transvestite and trans and non-binary companions studying at the Faculty of Journalism of the University of La Plata.”
In turn, he celebrated the possibility of making his life story visible, since “journalistic reports about us are always associated with crime and the criminalization of identities“.
“This life story tells of a pedagogical and deeply political process and it helps society understand that No trans transvestite is born a whore or a prostitute, but it is society that condemns you to places of extreme marginality and this is a clear example that we can receive from doctors, lawyers, teachers, whatever we want to be, “he said enthusiastically.
Claudia still remembers that day in 2005, when she was almost 30 years old, when her mother Juana Margarita Haro Morales accompanied her to the door of the La Plata college.
He remembered that he was dying “of nerves and fear of discrimination“and that his mother told him:” you don’t have to care about people, what you have to care about is what you feel, what you think, and that you have to do your career ‘”.
In her thesis, Claudia investigated the trans transvestite movement and focused on a group of Peruvians, called “las charapas”, because they came from the jungle area of that country, who migrated to La Plata and had to go through discrimination and organize to fight for their rights.
The thesis, which was directed by the Buenos Aires deputy from the Frente de Todos, Florencia Saintout, and the anthropologist Adriana Archenti, with the advice of the magister Verónica González, involved conducting a hundred interviews with “las charapas” and rebuilding ties of solidarity that they drew up to confront the mistreatment, the invisibility and the persecution.
