Kendry Martínez Wants To Be An Example of Hope For Other Trans Sex Workers
Surviving violence and adversity, from Tegucigalpa to Queens, New York.
By Bruce Gil
Kendry Martínez was nervous to perform on a stage for the first time in months. Dressed in black, she lip-synched and expertly danced to a cumbia remix by the Honduran group Chicas Rolands. The energy of the about 50-person crowd at Luna’s Kitchen and Bar in Jackson Heights pushed her to perform even better.
“I saw how people supported me, I saw how people cheered at me and everything. Those are little things that fill you up,” says Martínez.
She almost didn’t perform that April 3rd night, but she wanted to support the event’s organizer Laura Martínez, a trans community leader in New York and nightclub performer. She also felt now was the right moment since she’s been experiencing more stability in her life financially and emotionally. She left that night with $500 in tips and the crown of Miss Primavera.
But the road to that moment wasn’t always easy.
In the offices of Queens-based trans rights group Colectivo Intercultural TRANSgrediendo (CITGny), Martiínez shares her experience as a trans sex worker in Honduras. She tucks her long dark hair behind her left ear to show a now faded scar where she was cut with a knife for being trans. She’s grateful her scars aren’t noticeable.
“They killed us like we were nothing,” said 31-year-old Kendry Martínez. “In Honduras, the quality of life for us trans girls is not to live past 30 years old.”
Martínez left Honduras for the United States when she was 26. She has seen many friends in her home country be murdered for being trans. For choosing to be true to themselves.
Her friend Angie Ferreira, a prominent trans activist in Honduras, was shot while walking with friends on June 25, 2015. According to witnesses, the police did nothing to help Ferreira while she was bleeding-out. She was 26-years-old.
Honduras has the highest rate of murders of transgender people in the world, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project. From 2008–2020, 107 trans and gender-diverse people were reported murdered in Honduras — that’s a rate of nearly 11 murdered trans people per million inhabitants. In comparison, the trans murder rate in the United States during the same time period was only 0.8 reported murders per million inhabitants.
Martínez, like her friends, started working as a sex worker out of necessity when she was 19.
Her religious evangelical family rejected her when she came out initially as gay — although she knew from a young age that she was a woman.
“My family started to look at me differently. They didn’t see me as the star student anymore,” says Martínez who earned a bachelor’s in business administration in Honduras. Education was always an outlet for her to stand out from her siblings and cousins.
Her mother eventually kicked her out of the house. With no resources and few options, she started doing sex work.
A survivor of death threats and violence herself, the experience of living as a sex worker has changed Martínez.
According to Martínez, the violence in Honduras has made many trans sex workers from her country aggressive and naturally distrustful.
Her co-worker at CITGny, Nayra Berrios, remembers Martínez’s stand-offish demeanor when they both walked the same streets of Queens, New York, looking for clients.
“If I was here, she wouldn’t walk by where I was,” Berrios says. “She would come out of her house and walk by the other side because she was in her own world.”
But Martínez says she’s always had a strong character.
She is the type of person to open her own “street.” In Tegucigalpa there were already established zones for prostitution. But none for trans women. So, Martínez started her own. She went to one of the established zones, greeted the cisgender sex workers, and set up shop.
“I got there, and no one could have moved me from that spot,” she says. Other trans women joined her soon after. Gangs followed too and started to threaten and extort her and other sex workers in that zone.
After Ferreira’s murder Martínez took on her role as a coordinator for Muñecas de Acoiris, the trans collective of the Honduran LGBT rights group Acoiris. She presented with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at a conference in Washington DC in 2016.
“We also have been discriminated against by the military police. Us transsexuals are exposed to extortion, beatings, and mockery for no reason and detention without justification,” that’s how Martínez described the situation in her country.
Since that conference she has remained in the United States.
It was in the United States where she began her transition. As her hair grew longer and body started to change due to the hormones she was taking, she started experiencing harassment from co-workers at a snack distribution company she was working at in New York City. Her boss fired her.
Despite her past, Martínez still has faith in a higher power.
“God has looked out for me. He has been with me. He is the reason I’ve been able to leave that world in one piece,” says Martínez. Globally sex workers have a 45 to 75 percent chance of experiencing violence on the job, according to a systematic review of research published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Martínez says that God always puts angels in one’s path.
One of her many angels was the late Lorena Borjas, a mother-like figure for Latinx trans community in Queens who died of Covid-19 last year.
Martínez was sent to prison for stabbing an ex-boyfriend in what she says was self-defense. She spent one month in prison and then had to appear in court over the course of a year. With money from a community fund she managed, Borjas paid Marinez’s bail in April 2019. Martínez laughs remembering that Borjas joked that if she had known it was Martínez that she was bailing out she wouldn’t have paid it.
One of the last things Martínez remembers Borjas telling her was, “You have to change. Because if you keep going the way you are, you are going to get yourself into a lot of problems.”
Another one of her angels is Liaam Winslet, the executive director of CITGny. During the pandemic Martínez was at a low point in her life. She felt alone and had no job outside of sex work. She says she had no purpose. Then Winslet called her. She proposed that Martínez come work at CITGny.
In her role as a specialist in the organization’s Sex Work 101 Project, she helps connect trans sex workers with health services and legal aide. She says her work makes her feel useful.
Others are also noticing a difference in her. Martínez has had to assist women at CITGny who she’s gotten in physical altercations with in the past.
“They say ‘you’re the girl who did this to me or you’re the girl who hit me,’” says Martínez.
One woman she fought with twice in one week. The first time Martínez was actually trying to stop a fight between her and one of her friends but ended up getting involved. The second time the woman came looking for Martínez and Martínez beat her with a belt. Recently, they talked at CITGny.
“Remember what happened between us. It’s all forgotten because I’m seeing that you’ve changed and you’re not the same fighting girl,” said the woman, according to Martínez.
Martínez’s goal is to not need to do any sex work. She wants to continue her studies. She’s already earned her GED and now wants to get a degree in either nursing or social work. But she says she’s already accomplished one of her dreams.
One of Martínez’s earliest memories is a dream she had when she was five years old. In the dream she saw herself as a grown woman.
“I have reached that goal, because the moment I wake up I look at myself in the mirror and I feel satisfied with what I am seeing. In the dream I saw the person I see now in myself,” says Martínez.
