Claudia Cabrera-Lara, 43, sits on the corner of a bed with her partner Julia, 42, and strums an acoustic guitar in their Mission Street studio apartment. Her long brown mane is tied back in a ponytail and her dangling garnet earrings catch the afternoon sunlight that pours in through the bay window. As she hums a song she wrote years ago in her home country of Guatemala, she pauses every few bars to recall its melody. Julia remembers it, though. Dressed in a red polo shirt and blue jeans, she helps the tune along by tapping her hand in time with the music.

The studio is crowded with furniture and offers little elbowroom for Cabrera-Lara and her family of four. In the main room, bunk beds where her sons Elman and Kenneth sleep are stacked just an arm’s reach away from the twin bed she shares with Julia. A television sits on the floor, sandwiched between a box fan and an end table. When Cabrera-Lara breaks from singing to ask her wife for a glass of water, Julia steps into a tiny all-white kitchen where a chest of drawers stacked with papers stands wedged into a corner. The short stool that sits beneath the kitchen window offers the only escape from the claustrophobia inside with its view of Highway 101 and the Mission District bustle below.

“Yes, this is a very humble place for us to live,” says Cabrera-Lara, her words textured by her Guatemalan accent. “But we are all together here. That is the important thing.”

During her first six years in this country, Cabrera-Lara, who was born Elman Gilberto, sang these songs alone, thousands of miles away from her family. In 2000 she fled Guatemala to the U.S., escaping the violent persecution she faced daily for transitioning into a woman. One-and-a-half years later when Cabrera-Lara won U.S. asylum, she immediately applied to sponsor the immigration of Julia, whom she married while still living as a man, and their sons. But with her new legal status, which identifies her gender as female, she worried that U.S. restrictive immigration policies and its blind eye to same-sex partnerships could block her efforts to reunite her family.

“Even though I now had the freedom to be my true self, always the biggest thing on my mind was my family and bringing them here,” Cabrera-Lara recalls. “But I was afraid that because of my new gender status, they would reject my petition.”

Cabrera-Lara’s experience highlights the challenges transgender immigrants face when working within the U.S. Immigration System. On top of the red tape all foreign nationals encounter when applying for U.S. legal status—the forms, the physical examinations, the interviews—transgender immigrants risk discrimination from immigration officials, who advocacy groups argue don’t accept them for being different. But within the larger immigration reform movement, where the plight of gay and lesbian immigrants already takes a back seat to that of heterosexuals, issues that transgender immigrants face get swept under the carpet.

Chris Haiss, board member of Out4Immigration, an LGBT immigrant rights organization, says that the discrimination transgender people encounter stems from immigration officials’ lack of education.

“I’ve been lecturing on this for years to masters and doctorate programs and you’d be surprised at how many people have never discussed transgender issues in their entire careers,” says Haiss. “Immigration has always been controversial and LGBT people are always left out of the discussion. I don’t know why, but no one wants to be on the forefront with this.”

Transgender Law Center Executive Director Christopher Daley says that while transgender immigrants often come to a country that is more accepting than their home country, it still may not accept people who are transgender. Even in coming to San Francisco, a city famous for its cultural diversity, he says transgender immigrants can encounter discrimination.

“It makes it even more difficult to overcome other issues that are related to your immigration,” Daley says. “For instance, it could make it very difficult to trust an attorney to do your asylum case because you’re not sure if he or she has your best interest at heart.”

Isabelle Woodley, 24, immigrated to the U.S. from New Zealand as a 17-year-old boy. After taking years of hormone therapy and living as a woman, during her last year of college in New York City she married her American partner Brian, a transgender man. When Woodley petitioned for U.S. legal status on the basis of her marriage to an American citizen, she said the already complicated application process was exacerbated by the fact that while she identified as a woman, her marriage certificate identified her as man.

“I looked [transgender] and had been on hormones for years, yet I had to represent myself as a heterosexual male to lawyers and to the federal government,” she recalls. “So I priced plane tickets and made plans to get rid of all my stuff because I was living in terror that [the petition] wouldn’t go through.”

Haiss points out one fact that he says most people fail to recognize about the transgender community—that one's gender identity is separate from one's sexual orientation. For example, he says, there is a misconception that a man who transitions into a woman transitions into a straight woman.

“ People seem to not know that the sexual orientation of transgender men and women are the same as for everybody else—they can be straight, bi, gay or lesbian.”

In Cabrera-Lara’s case her transition turned her originally heterosexual marriage into a lesbian one in the eyes of the law. The Defense of Marriage Act, the U.S. policy that defines marriages as unions between men and women, denies same-sex partners all the benefits extended to legally recognized couples, including the reunification of American spouses with their foreign partners. In 2005, however, the Board of Immigration Appeals decided with the Matter of Lovo-Lara that as long as the marriage is valid where entered into, it should be valid for immigration purposes. In April of last year, Cabrera-Lara’s family finally joined her in San Francisco.

“For Guatemalan laws, I’m still a guy; it doesn’t matter what I do,” Cabrera-Lara says. “Since it’s a legal marriage there, they had to recognize it here and approve my petition. That was the first time being a man actually helped me.”

Last summer Cabrera-Lara began speaking about her experience as a transgender immigrant at LGBT immigration forums held in San Francisco. Joined by a panel of representatives from Out4Immigration, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Love Sees No Borders and the Human Rights Watch, she wanted to help bring attention to the queer community’s battle for immigration equality.

“I just think the way we are treated is completely unfair,” says Cabrera-Lara. “One of the stereotypes about [queer families] is that we’re unstable. But they’re sabotaging us because they do nothing to help us be stable. They don’t provide us a way to keep our families together.”

Daley points out that while transgender immigrants do fall through a lot of different cracks, over the last five or six years civil rights organizations have been trying to be really conscious about the needs of people who are both transgender and immigrant. He admits, though, that there’s a nationwide shortage of resources available to meet the needs of this marginalized social group.

“The question is: As an organization who provides services specifically to transgender people, are we culturally competent in terms of providing services to immigrants?” Daley says. “There are a lot of great groups out there who provide services to immigrants. But are they going to be as welcoming to a transgender person?”

While the pain of discrimination and years of separation remain fresh in Cabrera-Lara’s memory, spending the past year with her family in their humble Mission Street studio is proof that in the end it all worked out. But for many transgender immigrants, the threat of removal from the U.S. and separation from their families is a reality they face each day. To these people, Cabrera-Lara offers her personal mantra:

“As the transgender woman that I am, I am not asking for anything that doesn’t belong to me. But I’m demanding my right to be recognized as a human being.”