Ember Ireland/OutWrite
Co-written by Ember Ireland (they/xe) and Sarah Belew (she/they)
As everyone came back to campus for the start of a new school year, the UCLA LGBTQ Campus Resource Center (CRC) welcomed a new director! A first-generation Cuban-American born and raised in New York City, Vanessa Aviva González-Siegel (she/ella/ela) has come to lead our LGBTQ+ Center and help guide our queer community on campus. Coming from Columbia University as associate director for LGBTQ+ students, she is excited to inherit a full team to help improve LGBTQ+ student life at UCLA.
After one week as director, González-Siegel sat down with OutWrite so we could get to know more about her personal life, what brought her to Los Angeles, and what she hopes to accomplish in her new role.
González-Siegel grew up in a multi-generational Cuban household in New York City as “the first one in [her] family born in the United States. […] In the house, it was Cuba … English was not spoken.” She only learned English once she entered kindergarten and she was treated as an immigrant. This feeling of disconnection extended into her gender experience as a child:
I don't fit into the narrative of [knowing] I was different from a young age. 'I was born in the wrong body’ — that kind of media-sensationalized narrative, I don't fit into that. [...] The way I describe it is that the way I saw myself was not the way people saw me. The way I understood myself when I was by myself was not how people were engaging with me, and I felt confused by that.
She was introduced to queerness by her stepmother:
“I am second-gen queer, so I have two moms. [...][My stepmom] was the one that really exposed me [to] queer culture and drag for the first [time], just the different pieces of queer culture. And I realized that there was a culture I didn't know. Like, in New York, you grow up and you're taking the train as a kid, you see drag performers coming home in the morning and you're on your way to school. Like, that's very normative. But I never connected it to a culture, because there is a culture to being queer, and a history, and a legacy, and we have ancestors, and I never knew any of that until [I met my stepmom], and I knew I was queer pretty quickly, but it didn't feel like the full story. I felt like there was more, but I didn't really understand how to communicate it or frame it or understand it.”
Starting college, González-Siegel attended Rutgers University-New Brunswick for her undergraduate education. Being surrounded by queer and trans people kickstarted her journey as a trans woman and as a leader in the higher education LGBTQ+ community:
[In] college, I went to the LGBT Center because I made a friend at orientation named Aiden [who was] was a work-study student who already got a job at the center […] ‘They're doing a program and they need people.’ It was called Breathing Room […] and it was just like a dialogue talking about […]whatever's on our minds. There were trans folks there and it was my first time ever knowingly [being] in a room with out, open, trans and nonbinary people. And I remember sitting there and just being like, ‘Mmm, same!’ Like, things were just in alignment. And I panicked […] I remember having such a visceral reaction when I left […] but I kept going back to Breathing Room every Monday night. I always went back, went back, went back.
When asked to give her advice to students still on their queer self-discovery journeys, our director said:
“The journey never ends, and you have to take your time, and you have to be really kind to yourself. Oftentimes, when we're transitioning or going through a discovery phase, it's often the first time we're putting ourselves first in our lives, because we're constantly balancing and juggling other people's expectations of us, and we're putting on a front, and we're playing a role that other people expect of us, and so you have to be really kind, really different. But at least I could talk to people, and that was really important.”
González-Siegel explained further the importance of not comparing yourself to others while transitioning:
“You're your own blueprint. You have to be your own goal, because you should never compare yourself to another person. I am a possibility model of what does it mean to build a life for yourself. [...] You should never compare yourself to another trans person, because everyone's circumstances, context, everything is different, and I got to where I am because I focused on myself, not focused on other people.”
We asked González-Siegel why she wanted to travel all the way across the country, after living 30 years in the city she was born and raised in, and come to UCLA:
I've always done LGBTQ work in diversity or multicultural office contexts. [...] I want to kind of focus more on the criticality part of the work. And so I wanted the challenge of, I've now established this expertise [of how] I do gender and sexuality work that's rooted in social justice education. Now, how do I bring that back to center work? Because oftentimes centers default white, they usually don't do well when talking about social justice education. They oftentimes see themselves as separate spaces, when in reality, they are connected. And so I wanted to bring that. [...] And then also, just like in my personal life, I needed a change. [...] And it was when I got the offer, it was kind of, like, why not? Like, I have so many reasons to say yes, but I don't have any reasons to say no.
When asked about what queer activism topics she is interested in outside of university life, she explained that she is interested in modern policy and movement actions:
“What is our movement doing? I don't know what any major LGBTQ organization has been doing since marriage equality passed in 2015. What's the policy platform? You know, they're making a lot of noise about anti-trans bills, but no one's actually putting anything forward to combat it.”
González-Siegel is also interested in the intersections of “being queer, trans and a person of color, and the cultural dynamics that come with that, and navigating being both ‘and’.” Her other interests include:
I love talking about transness. I love how us as trans people can just transgress everything that people think is so absolute. I really like having conversations about classism within the queer community, actually, because there's actually a lot of classism, particularly around queer aesthetics and queer fashion. […] I really love having conversations within sapphic spaces about TERFiness. As a sapphic trans woman, I have a lot of thoughts and just my own personal experiences navigating that. Like, coming out never ends. And I love having that conversation, you're never not coming out the rest of your life. You're never not transitioning. Like, transitioning has no end. [...] One of the topics that I present on often and speak at a lot of conferences is how colonialism is the root of queer and trans antagonism.
Her favorite color is any type of blue, but she has a particular affinity for royal blues and jewel tones. She is a March Pisces, a Pisces sun, Pisces moon, and a Capricorn rising. González-Siegel is also a well-versed solo traveler; she has visited 25 countries and counting. As a trans woman, she takes specific measures to ensure her safety:
I'm a trans woman who has a level of passing privilege, and so is able to go through life and also who has the privilege of her documents matching, right? So I'm able to go through immigration, I'm able to apply for visas, and I'm able to kind of navigate those pieces, in those spaces, in a way where I blend in. But I also take a lot of safety considerations when I am abroad. I don't go out at night by myself, I don't go to a lot of social spaces on my own. I'm usually booking a group experience through Airbnb Experience, so I'm with people.
She enjoys visiting the LGBTQ+ community wherever she goes to learn and be immersed in various queer scenes. “Even in countries where queerness is criminalized or targeted, there’s still always queer space, and you can always find it. I always go, and when I’m in those spaces, I say, ‘I do queer work for a living,’ and they’re always so fascinated that our universities have these spaces.”
Traveling abroad has informed González-Siegel’s work with queer and trans people, because she has seen firsthand how queerness and transness are global, even if they might use different words:
Our understanding of queerness and transness in the U.S. is not the absolute; it is not the most right. The language and terminology and framings that we utilize here are not the most accurate or most correct. There's so many other ways of knowing and being all over the world, and I think bringing that here would be really interesting to see. [...] We come from different contexts [so] let's actually focus on where those contexts come from, and what are the root of these things, and how do we actually understand, how are we as queer and trans people, globally, navigating our spaces?
González-Siegel expressed her leadership style of observing and taking notes before she takes action in her new role. She said:
I would like to grow the Center. I would like to think about [...] what are we doing, and how are we also at the cutting edge of LGBTQ work? You know, we're in a moment where universities are closing centers. [...] How do we make sure that this center not only survives but grows and thrives? How do we set ourselves up as the standard for centers in the country? How do we set up ourselves as not just, ‘Oh, we're just a center’ — we're the center.
After a tumultuous school year with protests and violent repression, and with an even more uncertain school year ahead, González-Siegel is coming into UCLA while administration continuously restricts students’ actions due to protests against the genocide of Palestinians committed by the Israeli occupation. Over a month after we initially interviewed González-Siegel, we followed up with her after she had time to review the new policies on campus restricting student’s rights to protest on campus:
So the Time Place Manner policy is a re-emphasis of a pre-existing policy that existed many, many years ago. What's important to note is that the Trump administration, in about 2018/2019, … started asking for all universities to revise their time, place, manner policies, because every university has always had one. It's just when the university [has] communicated it to students [that] has been variable, depending on the institution. [...] I think the policies are open for comment right now on the regents website … and I really encourage every single student to read it, understand it, and comment on it, because from what I've heard, they are looking at the comments, they are looking at [...] what students are writing, and they are going to utilize that.
We asked what advice she offers to student activists in regard to these policies.
There's something called the social change ecosystem. It's an organizing theory that basically means movements don't happen in a vacuum, and everyone plays a different role to create overall pressure to make change. So not everyone is going to carry the bullhorn for the protest, right? Someone had to work with town hall to get the permit for the protest. [...] Everyone has a strength that they can find in movement work to do that for the greater good. And so I encourage student activists to be aware of every policy; there's always a way to continue to do what students want to do within policy. I was a student activist when I was in undergrad and I found policies very limiting and confusing, but I was a more effective advocate and activist once I learned what the policies were. … I needed to understand that, even if I disagree or agree with it, I'm able to then leverage that knowledge to create a strategy around it.
If you have any questions for our director, González-Siegel has an open-door policy to build and maintain student accessibility. “If folks are stopping in the center […] and they poke their head in, and my door’s open, they can come in.” She has expressed her hopes to continue improving the main Center and reopening its LGBTQ+ library collection next school year to further support and engage the community. She’s always ready to talk about transness and queerness, classism, colonialism, and other issues within the LGBTQ+ community, traveling, and students’ needs.
Stop by the LGBTQ+ CRC and say hi to our new director!