Herlen Murieles

Herlen was born on November 3, 1993, in Apartadó, Colombia. She is an only child and was orphaned by her father, who died in a traffic accident when she was a baby. Although she comes from a Catholic family, she has identified as an atheist since the age of 17 because, even though she had been answering her existential questions from an evolutionary perspective, she felt that the symbolic structures of Christianity hindered the free and healthy development of her personality and her homosexual desire (now as a transgender woman, her heterosexual desire).

At age 13, she moved with her mother from Apartadó to Turbo, to live with her grandmother, some cousins, and maternal uncles. He had his first sexual encounter with another young man his age at 14. At 15, he confessed to his mother what they already knew but found difficult to acknowledge: that he was homosexual. At 16, he had his first kiss with another man his age, and at 17, he graduated from high school in Apartadó at a school that no longer exists.

She applied four times to SENA to study public accounting technology, but was never accepted. She then applied to the anthropology program at the University of Antioquia in Turbo, where she was admitted and from where she was catapulted into an academic exchange at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico during the first semester of 2014. She was the first person from the University of Antioquia in the region to participate in an international exchange and became an inspiration for other students. In her first semester at university, she had her first public boyfriend, Juan Fernando, but he broke up with her for no reason after a week, and they never had sex, only kissing and cuddling in the university hallways.

In 2020, renowned anthropologist Eduardo Restrepo, who read his thesis and was impressed by his writing, awarded him a half scholarship to study at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in the Master’s program in Latin American Cultural Studies, a program that Eduardo led and later resigned from due to incompatibility of values with the faculty. Despite the hectic problems that affected much of her initial motivation for the program, Herlen managed to graduate on March 25, 2022, with a master’s degree in Latin American cultural studies. Her thesis, Raikantopini (referenced in works), was one of the highest-rated and most praised, which, together with her overall performance, led her to obtain the degree of honor cum laude awarded by the university.