On Tuesday (1), the University Council of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), in the state of São Paulo, unanimously approved the creation of a quota system for trans, transvestite and non-binary people on the institution’s undergraduate courses. Reservations will be available through the National High School Exam (Enem)-Unicamp notice and for both public and private school students.
The new policy establishes that undergraduate courses with up to 30 regular places must reserve at least one for the aforementioned population, while courses with 30 or more places must offer two. Academic units will decide whether these places will be regular or additional. If they are additional, there will be no obligation to fill them. In cases where places are withdrawn from open competition, half of them will be allocated to Black and Indigenous candidates.
Admission will be based on self-declaration accompanied by a life story, which will be assessed by a verification committee. According to Unicamp’s Permanent Entrance Examination Commission (Comvest, in Portuguese), 279 candidates applied for the 2025 entrance exam under their social names, 40 of whom were invited. Visual Arts, Biological Sciences and Medicine were the top undergraduate courses in this group last year.
The decision resulted from discussions that included grassroots movements, students and the university rectory, in an agreement signed during the 2023 student strike. “This is another historic moment for our university,” said José Alves Neto, coordinator of Comvest and a member of the Working Group that drew up the proposal. According to him, seven of the 15 members of it are trans people.
The group argues that the policy is in line with the university’s affirmative actions and responds to the historical exclusion of the trans population from higher education in Brazil. Currently, at least 13 federal and state universities in the country already have some kind of quota for this population.
On X (formerly Twitter), federal deputy Erika Hilton (Socialism and Freedom Party) celebrated the decision. “I am extremely proud of this victory for public education, the student community, the trans population and Unicamp itself,” she wrote on her social media accounts. The left-wing parliamentarian, a trans woman herself, was at Unicamp on March 25, where she took part in a discussion about the agenda.
