In Catholicism, sainthood may be granted to an individual posthumously through the process of canonization: a rigorous investigation into the life of a Christian of “exceptional holiness” who is believed to have attained eternal life in Heaven. Among the numerous qualifications to be met: an official recognition as a servant of god, evidence of a virtuous life in accordance with the Church’s teachings, and the attribution of at least one miracle, typically, to the candidate in question. Cecilia Gentili, artist, writer, performer, activist, transgender icon, and devoted mother to many in New York City, can teach all of us, regardless of our faiths, what it means to live and fight for those we love—the force behind many miracles we can tie back to a legacy that gives new meaning to sainthood entirely.
In light of Gentili’s recent passing at age 52, I dove head first into the archives of transgender saints throughout history and was heartened to have discovered a few recorded instances, such as Perpetua, Marinos, and the popular, yet controversial, Joan d’Arc.
In the public declaration of her faith, Perpetua, describing one of her final visions while preparing for a fight with the Egyptians, writes, “I was stripped, and became a man.” Though their stories may not explicitly detail their experiences with gender, likely due to looming threats of imprisonment or execution for “heresy”––like Joan, for instance, who famously deviated from gender norms and burned at the stake as a proclaimed heretic by the church––it can be gathered from the preservation of many of their narratives that these revolutionary trans figures, including others lost to history, strayed far from what the Roman Catholic church considered to be “the image of god.”
Cecilia was born in Gálvez, Santa Fe in 1972, only four years prior to Argentina’s military dictatorship and its onslaught of extreme political repression, known as the “Dirty War,” which resulted in the deaths or “disappearances” of tens of thousands of civilians who were suspected to be subverts or left-wing “terrorists.” In an interview with Trans Oral History Project in 2017, Cecilia recalls her first childhood memories in Argentina, enduring constant pressure from family members to keep a veil over her true identity, finding solace under a tangerine tree at her grandmother’s house, and imagining she might have been born on some fantastical transfeminine planet populated only by other girls with penises.
Cecilia began using the girl’s restroom at an early age because it felt right, for which she continually found herself in trouble during elementary school. Fast forward to 2024, the year of her death, where the simple act of urinating as a trans person continues to be a public debate amid increasingly popular “bathroom bans” implemented by at least 11 states in the U.S., and where, overall, a whopping 428 active bills target every aspect of a trans person’s life–including healthcare, education, employment, incarceration, and the military. I can’t help but think of 16-year-old Nex Benedict who recently died in February after being brutally attacked by fellow students in their high school restroom in Oklahoma, and the countless, unnamed trans and nonbinary youth who have faced inexplicable violence as a result of the rapidly growing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the country.
As a nonbinary trans man who began medically transitioning in my late twenties, it was just last year that I experienced my first altercation after deciding to use the cramped men’s restroom in the Whole Foods at Union Square during a break from Pride Week festivities. (The paradox of visibility comes to mind here.) I was high on mushrooms, which only exacerbated the muddled trio of fear, anger, and humiliation simmering in my core, and although I walked out physically unscathed and, for the most part, equipped to tend to my own insecurities about “passing,” there remains a lingering apprehension whenever I enter a men’s restroom. I often opt for the dreaded “W” in the event that I am cursed by the binary in public spaces, for the sake of my own wellbeing. It breaks my heart to imagine my younger, closeted self in that Whole Foods restroom, trembling in fury under the cis male gaze, completely at the mercy of a man twice my size fuming with toxic male fragility.
I think many of the trans people in my life, especially those who, like me, were raised in ultra-religious, conservative households across the Bible Belt, can relate to the phenomenon of having an innate understanding of their gender from an early age, and the struggle with language encompassing it, or the lack thereof. Growing up in the South, I always played the husband during games of House, never questioning my eager tribute. My first kiss at age ten was in an episode of make-believe with my friend and neighbor Hannah, in which I played the role of her boyfriend at her coy request. We made quite a habit out of our pretend relationship, my own sprouting feelings for her kept carefully under wraps. Imagining myself in any other role felt ludicrous. Contemptuous whispers and rumors that she was a lesbian eventually spread like wildfire around our suburban neighborhood. When Hannah moved away, I didn’t kiss another girl for a decade.
During every girls-only slumber party throughout junior high school, I experienced a burdensome sense of displacement. In retrospect, as cliché as it sounds, I envied their flawless portrayal of girlhood, my own attempts falling short as I yearned for both their attention and approval. I dated (read: AOL instant messaged) boys that I wanted to look like, chopped my hair off up to the nape of my neck for the first time, and took up skateboarding at 13 just to prove I was capable, if only to myself. Like Cecilia, I knew what felt right for me, even if my deviation from cisheteronormativity was deemed “sinful”–an invitation for God himself to intervene.
What I didn’t realize at 13, but understand now, is that the god I’ve been praying to all along is also a faggot.
David Wojnarowicz, a multidisciplinary American artist, writer, and AIDS activist who spoke candidly of his passions and anxieties into a tape recorder while confronting his HIV diagnosis, frames the limitations of language so aptly in his tape journals, comparing his struggle to transcribe the elusiveness of a singular feeling to “[the approximation] of something that’s like a cyclone,” an analogy that never fails to pull at my heart. When I relate this truth to my transness, it broadens the possibilities of everything I was forced to believe about myself. Perhaps my gender was always meant to transcend language.
After high school graduation, Cecilia discovered community through sex work, an age-old profession through which many Black and brown trans women are able to find stability within a society that systematically rejects them. Like any other profession, sex work was merely that to her: work. A means to an end. During this time, Cecilia struggled with drug addiction and sought treatment at Samaritan Village after her first few years living in New York City, leading her to The Center for group counseling where she eventually began facilitating her own meetings for trans women. During her time in recovery, she went through the asylum process with assistance from Catholic Charities and was able to land her first legal job as a patient navigator at Apicha, a community health center based in Lower Manhattan that prioritizes LGBTQ+ health and wellness. Cecilia transformed Apicha significantly over the four years that she worked there, so much so that she required a larger staff to keep up with growing clientele and insisted on exclusively hiring trans women of color. By that point, she had been recruited by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a health center dedicated to providing support for those living with or otherwise affected by HIV/AIDS, where she was named the Managing Director of Policy only six months after her onboarding in 2016.
In her lifetime, Cecilia championed protection for all trans people and played a crucial role in bridging a significant gap in New York City through her intersectional advocacy around HIV/AIDS, breaking through stigmas affecting marginalized communities brought to the fore by the 1980s health crisis. Overall, Cecilia’s outreach work in New York City spanned a wide range of issues including abolition, healthcare access, sex worker’s rights, homelessness, and gender-based discrimination. She worked tirelessly for people to understand these struggles as interwoven. Cecilia lobbied for GENDA (the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act) which was enacted in 2019 as part of an amendment to the Human Rights Law, adding further protections specific to transgender people within the spheres of employment, housing, and public accommodations. In 2019, she also founded Trans Equity Consulting, a policy-reform organization providing workshops, campaign support, conflict mediation and more, all in an effort to make institutions, academic settings, and workplaces more inclusive, by educating on the LGBTQ+ community. In a partnership with Callen Lorde in 2021, NYC’s largest LGBTQ+ community health clinic, Cecilia created the COIN program (Cecilia’s Occupational Inclusion Network), which to this day provides free healthcare to all sex workers.
Her extensive collaborations in community-oriented projects and affiliations with grassroots initiatives such as DecrimNY, a coalition of sex workers and allies dedicated to the destigmatization, decarceration, and decriminalization of the sex trade in New York, for which she was also the founder, is a true testament to a life spent committed to the liberation of all people. Her wholehearted commitments to justice are a true representation of saintliness, redefining traditional notions of sanctity through her courage, compassion, and advocacy for marginalized voices.
The fruits of Cecilia’s love and labor will forever remain deeply embedded in the life of every trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming person in New York City. This much was evident at her recent funeral service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as the church’s pews overflowed and resounding cries of her name echoed out into the morning air for every passerby on Fifth Avenue to hear. It was an iconic place to memorialize a woman of her esteem, considering St. Patrick’s Cathedral was central to many HIV/AIDS related protests in the 1980s. Most notably was Stop The Church, a demonstration organized by ACT UP in December 1989 that disrupted a Mass service and received national attention, ultimately forcing the U.S. government to confront their negligence surrounding the health crisis and their complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Above all, Cecilia embodied the spirit of a saint, transcending the boundaries of convention and challenging sanctimony as a trans sex worker of color. She even mocked the hypocrisy of the church in her debut off-broadway show, Red Ink, and much to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York’s disdain, was a self-proclaimed atheist. A quintessential matriarch, she fiercely protected the livelihood of those commonly ostracized by Christianity in a time of escalating fascism by the religious right in America. For those who cherished Cecilia, her willingness to stand up for those most persecuted by the Church seemed nothing short of miraculous, though such acts of grace would never find recognition within Catholic doctrine. In an Instagram story reposting the statement from St. Patrick’s Cathedral calling for a Mass of Reparation after her controversial funeral service, one user wrote, “they wouldn’t know a saint if one slapped them in the face.”
Cecilia’s legacy reminds me, all of us, of the inherent resilience and generosity of trans people in loving a world that often tries to erase us. After all, we bear a responsibility to one another, a duty to care for, protect, and defend each other, because only we can truly keep us safe. I am reminded that trans people will write their own history, and will avoid the exploitation of our narratives. Our truths are tokens of valor; sacred mementos for trans generations to come.
A holy card with an illustration of Cecilia sits at my bedside, next to an amber bottle of immunity tincture and a Trans Oral History Project postcard. Her hair is slicked back into a ponytail, leather jacket draped over her shoulder, her right hand placed tenderly over her heart as she gazes into the distance looking cunt as ever. It reads, “Travesti, Puta, Bendita, Madre. Be my child.” Underneath, the verse of Psalm 23. When I think of Cecilia now, I hear her shouting, “I want all the faggotry and tranny behavior!” in celebration of love and life, somewhere in a queer paradise. When I pray to Saint Cecilia, I feel the warmth of her protection, and I see her smiling down at me from Heaven, enveloped in the holy splendor of tangerines.