Cecilia Gentili

Cecilia Gentili (January 31, 1972 – February 6, 2024) was an Argentine American advocate for the rights of transgender people and sex workers.

Born in Argentina, she moved to New York City.

She held leadership positions at the LGBTQ HIV/AIDS care nonprofits GMHC and APICHA, co-founded a free clinic for sex workers at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, co-founded DecrimNY, an organization which successfully decriminalized sex work in New York and repealed the "Walking while trans law", and founded Trans Equity Consulting.

Gentili also filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's removal of non-discrimination protections for gender identity in the Affordable Care Act.

Gentili was born on January 31, 1972, and raised in the Argentinian city of Gálvez, Santa Fe.

Her parents were Italian and Argentinian.

She was sexually abused by a neighbor throughout her childhood, beginning when she was six years old.

She came out as gay at 12 years old, with her mother being more open-minded about her sexuality than her father, and her brother struggling to accept her.

Gentili's grandmother, an Indigenous woman from the countryside, was "the only person who truly was open to a conversation about gender".

Gentili attended Baptist services with her as a child; however, when the pastor admonished Gentili for wearing earrings one week, they both left the church in protest.

She was verbally and physically attacked on the streets, sometimes by the local authorities as in the late 1980s and early 1990s it was illegal to wear clothing of the opposite sex in Argentina.

Gentili moved to Rosario, a larger city, to attend college.

It was there that she met a trans person for the first time, and started to identify as a woman.

At age 26 she decided to move to the United States in search of a better life.

After living in Brazil, she moved to the United States.

She first moved to Miami, where she had difficulty finding a job due to not having a legal status.

Within two weeks of arriving in Miami, she was arrested for prostitution and placed in a male jail.

She continued to live in Miami for five years.

Over the next few years, she struggled with drug addiction, engaged in sex work, spent more time in prison, and faced a deportation order.

When Gentili moved to New York City in 2003, she was both undocumented and a sex worker.

In 2009, she was arrested on drug possession charges and imprisoned at Rikers, but was let out with an ankle bracelet as she could not be safely housed with either men or women, being assaulted by both groups.

In 2010, Gentili began an internship at The LGBT Center, where she began working with the NYC Anti-Violence Project.

She was granted asylum in the United States in 2011, and legally changed her name the following year.

She subsequently entered an addiction recovery program.

She became a U.S. citizen in September 2022.

From 2012 until 2016, she was the trans health program coordinator at the Apicha Community Health Center in New York City.

From 2016 to 2019, Gentili was the Director of Policy at the GMHC, an AIDS service organization in New York City and the world's first organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention.

In 2017, Gentili mounted The Knife Cuts Both Ways, a comedic one-woman show based on light-hearted stories from her life.

Also that year, she modeled for American fashion designer Gogo Graham.

While part of the GMHC, she championed the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), a proposed piece of state legislation which was eventually signed into law in 2019.

Gentili was active in the formation of and led the DecrimNY campaign (formed 2019), which works to decriminalize sex work in New York and successfully repealed the "Walking while trans law", which criminalized "loitering for the purposes of prostitution" and was used to unfairly target, harass, and arrest transgender women of color.

She was also a core leader behind the Lorena Borjas Trans Equity Fund, which provided $1.8 million to organizations serving transgender people.

In 2019, she founded Trans Equity Consulting, a development consulting firm that sought to center trans women of color, immigrants, sex workers, and incarcerated people.

That year, she also joined the Board of Directors of Stonewall Community Foundation, a New York-based, LGBTQ-focused grantmaking organization, where she served until her death.

In 2020, she hosted Fierce Futures, a fundraiser supporting organizations that aid Black trans people.

In 2020, under the Trump Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services removed provisions in the Affordable Care Act on sex discrimination, which included gender identity, days before the Supreme Court issued a ruling that protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sex extend to gay and transgender people.

Gentili and Tanya Asapansa-Johnson Walker brought a lawsuit against the department with the aid of the Human Rights Campaign and the law firm BakerHostetler, arguing the rule "directly contravenes" the Supreme Court ruling.

Gentili was a co-founder of Callen-Lorde Community Health Center "Cecilia's Occupational Inclusion Network" (COIN) clinic, the first dedicated healthcare center for sex workers on the East Coast, which was created in 2021.

In October 2023, she was among hundreds arrested at a rally calling for a ceasefire in Gaza organized by the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace.

She was a leading voice among the hundreds of New York Times contributors who spoke out against the newspaper's biased coverage of transgender people.