After 17 Years As a Sex Worker, Nayra Berrios Offers Protection To Her Colleagues Who Work The Streets
The occupation is a last resort, she says, for many trans women who face a chronic lack of opportunity.
Nayra Berrios learned the word transgender in a gay club in San Juan, when Kim Moore, a well-known performed, emerged from behind a curtain, wearing little more than a green cape and iridescent pasties. Berrios approached Moore, who is a trans woman, after the show.
“If you want to be a woman, look for hormones, inject yourself and there, you’re on your way,” Moore told her.
Berrios was 17 years old. She befriended a group of trans sex workers, who invited her into their homes and helped her to aquire hormones for her transition. At 18 years old, she invited her family to her uncle’s house for a “surprise.” While they gathered on the street below, she came out of the second floor with pride, in a blonde wig and dressed in black.
Her mother accepted her, but at that time, her stepfather didn’t. After two weeks sleeping in her car, she approached the group of sex workers who had supported her transition. Once again, the women took her in, offering her makeup and clothing. Berrios was afraid, but after losing her job in a restaurant due to her transition, she felt she had no other choice.
“On that same day, I made my first $100 with the first car I got into and then I felt rich,” said Berrios. “I got into another and got $70 and in a few days, I already had my apartment.”
That is how Berrios began to do sex work. Now 35 years old, she still lives through the work, although she’s begun to transition to her new role as an organizer at the Colectivo Intercultural TRANSgrediendo (CITGny) in Jackson Heights, Queens. In her 17 years as a sex worker, she has always seen her work as one of survival. A last resort, she says, for many trans women confronted by a chronic lack of opportunities.
“The first is the rejection of your family and the second is the rejection of society,” said Berrios. “Because you can pass more as a gay or lesbian person, but when you’re trans, society excludes you.”
When Berrios isn’t working, she likes to go to the beach. Preferably Coney Island, and preferably alone.
“I arrive there with my little bag; my towel,” said Berrios. “I don’t need anybody to enjoy that moment and to be there in the water — to see the water — and to feel like a mermaid.”
As a child, she spent a lot of time alone. Her parents used to tell her to learn to cook, to clean, to study, and to do everything she could to be self-sufficient, because they knew it was unlikely that she would rely on anyone else.
“Our life [as trans women] is very solitary,” said Berrios. “We have to love ourselves and only have men for sex, plus a good friend who is always at your side, so that when we grow old, you take care of me and I take care of you.”
In 2012, Berrios, then 28 years old and still living in Puerto Rico, heard rumors from her friends of a woman on her way to the island who was exceptionally beautiful, had a remarkable body, and who, as a trans sex worker, was poised to steal a lot of their business.
“So, when she — her name is Gabriela — arrived from New York, Berrios avoided her, even when they were working outside of the same club. Until one day, they found themselves smoking together at a mutual friend’s house. Gabriela turned to Berrios and said: “You’re going to be my daughter. You’re not going to be like that. I’m going to give you hormones tomorrow.”
Many trans women take estrogen-based hormones to help align their appearance with their gender identity. While hormone therapy is available through a doctor’s prescription, some trans people without insurance or those who experience other structural barriers access hormones through a black market or informal exchanges.
At the time, Berrios was struggling with her hormone regimen, which can be physically and emotionally taxing, in addition to social and familial pressures. She would stop and resume her hormone therapy, each time putting more stress on her body.
The next day, Gabriela took Berrios to get her nails, hair, and facial hair done. During the years before meeting Gabriela, Berrios only wore makeup and feminine outfits at night.
“After that, everything changed. It changed my way of doing makeup, it changed the way I dress,” said Berrios. “I had enough hormones then, because she had me all week and would share every day.”
In 2014, when Gabriela announced her plan to return to New York, Berrios asked to go with her. Days after Gabriela’s flight, Berrios flew to Connecticut, where she stayed with her sister, working as a cleaner at the same company.
“It was a lot less than what I was normally earning,” said Berrios. “But if I wanted a normal life, as they say, then that’s what I would have to do.”
A year later, Gabriella called her. On her first day in New York, she arrived to a house where people practiced sex work. She put up an ad on Backpage, a former website where many sex workers used to announce their services.
Shortly after, her first client arrived, then the second, the third, and the fourth.
On a normal day, the intersection of 82nd Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens is packed with commuters, open-air preachers, and street vendors selling elote, churros, and kebabs next to fast food restaurants and mom and pop bakeries.
A few blocks from 82nd Street Station, a sign commemorates Julio Rivera, a gay Puerto Rican man, whose murder in 1990 sparked the first Queens Pride Parade. The neighborhood has been a center for the Latinx LGBTQ community for decades and is also home of the annual Marcha de Lxs Putxs, which centers trans Latinx sex workers, many of whom work on Roosevelt Avenue.
Since she moved to New York, Berrios has lived in Jackson Heights. One afternoon in 2017, she accompanied a friend to a follow-up appointment at Elmhurst Hospital. Together, they walked up 82nd Street to get lunch at McDonalds when a man, who had been harassing passersby all day, saw Berrios and her friend.
“He was looking for problems that day,” said Berrios. From afar, she remembers him yelling that he wanted to kill them because they were trans. Everything happened quickly: a mass movement of residents in the intersection formed a circle with Berrios, her friend, and her attacker in the middle.
“All of 82nd stopped. You couldn’t pass, not even the cars, because everyone stopped,” said Berrios. “Nearly 2,000 people were filmed [on the security cameras] surrounding us and nobody did anything. They just recorded with their cell phones, watching the fight as a man fought with two transgender women.”
The man broke Berrios’ leg, but he was never prosecuted for a hate crime. She says that the prosecutor told her that “for that not to happen [to trans women], then we shouldn’t leave our house.”
It was after a press conference about the attack that Berrios met Lorena Borjas, “the mother of the trans Latinx community” and Liaam Winslet, the current Executive Director of CITGny, for the first time.
“I don’t know anything here. I’m just a simple sex worker and I don’t know what rights I have,” responded Berrios, when Borjas asked her what she needed. Borjas asked to speak with her the next day at CITGny’s office, which was then in Jamaica, Queens, but is now located in Jackson Heights.
“And from there, from that same day, I never separated myself from Lorena nor from Liaam,” said Berrios.
She became a volunteer at CITGny, which offers services and outreach to the trans Latinx community in Queens. In 2019, she became a part-time staff member, leading the group’s Sex Work 101 project together with Kendry Martínez.
“We help a lot of women and that’s fulfilling for us, because now we aren’t the ones in need, but we know what they live through,” said Berrios. “We know what trans people need, because we are trans.”
When Borjas passed away from COVID-19 in March 2020, it was a tremendous loss for the group. She had a magical quality, according to Berrios, that included an impeccable memory and a relentless commitment to her community. Berrios’ fellow sex workers would call Borjas when they were detained by the police, and she always seemed able to ensure their liberation.
“I think she knew that she was going to go. Not that she was going to die in these years, but that was going to retire,” said Berrios. “Because she chose each one of us at the collective and she made us and put us here for that reason.”
Through her role at CITGny, Berrios has begun to partially transition out of sex work, although she still walks up Roosevelt Avenue once a month, distributing condoms and offering other forms of protection to sex workers on the street.
“Now that we’re in 2021, I want us [the trans community] to be more visible,” said Berrios. “I want those who come after me to have somewhere to go.”
