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By Catherine O’Neill Grace

Photograph: Courtesy of Alejandra Caraballo

Alejandra Caraballo ’12 has decorated the walls of her office at Harvard Law School with images of the heroes that help motivate her. Among them are Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and trans pioneers and advocates Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

Caraballo is one of two trans women of color, both Latina, working at Harvard Law School. In August 2021, she joined the Cyberlaw Clinic as a clinical instructor. The clinic provides pro-bono legal services on issues relating to the Internet, new technology and intellectual property. Caraballo presents a weekly seminar on topics relevant to cyberlaw and ethics. “Then, my job is working on actual projects with students—real cases with real clients.”

Assigned male at birth, Caraballo transitioned right after she graduated from Brooklyn Law School. “I was not out until 2016, four years after I graduated from UT,” she says. “But I was definitely a very strong supporter of LGBTQ rights—even throughout high school.” She says her family members, who still live in Tampa where she grew up, are “super supportive of me and my identity.”

After earning her J.D. at Brooklyn Law, Caraballo considered corporate work, but after doing law clinics with low-income seniors and asylum seekers, “it became really clear that I wanted to do public-interest work. That’s where my heart was. And then about two weeks after the bar exam, I came out, which was pretty terrifying.”

Caraballo got a fellowship at a New York legal assistance group, working on the LGBTQ Law Project. That “kick-started my legal career,” she says. “So then, fast forward, I ended up moving towards trans-rights litigation.”

After five years of direct legal services work with the LGBTQ community around issues such as healthcare access, immigration and family law, Caraballo decided to shift to something that wasn’t primarily LGBTQ-focused. “I had a friend who worked at the Cyberlaw Clinic who said, ‘You really should apply.’”

Ironically, her career change “actually gave me more time to do LGBT advocacy in my spare time,” says Caraballo. “I’ve shifted into online digital activism around all of the rising hate against LGBTQ people on social media. I’m uniquely positioned to fight against this, given where I am and the resources I have. It is a particularly terrifying time, especially when your community has basically been made the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with the country.”

Despite the current challenging political climate for the LGBTQ community, Caraballo is not without hope. “This is the best job I’ve ever had,” she says. “I get to work with students. I have the freedom to do advocacy work outside office hours. The atmosphere today, even in this reactionary moment, is still so much better for LGBTQ youth than it has ever been.”