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= Cecilia Gentili = Cecilia Gentili is an Argentinian transgender activist and sex-workers rights advocate.

She is the Vice President of Transcend Legal, an organization which seeks to gain more equality in social, medical, and legal recognition of transgender people. She also currently serves as the Assistant Director of Public Affairs at Gay Men's Health Crisis. She is also a board member at Translatina Network. She runs Transequity, a policy reform organization. She is also an activist working to decriminalize sex work.

Biography
Gentili was born in 1972 in a small town in Argentina. From a young age, she knew that she knew that she was different and did not feel comfortable in her body. She said, "when I was a child, I thought I was an extraterrestrial." She attended the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in the city of Rosario, Santa Fe Province, Argentina. When she was in college, she met the first trans woman she had ever encountered. Gentili turned to this woman for help, who told her that as a trans woman, her life was going to be limited. She told Gentili that the only profession available for her was sex work, which would involve drugs and would cause her to die young.

Gentili began sex work believing that that was the life of a trans woman. She describes the oppression faced by trans sex workers in Argentina at the time as horrific. When she was sexually assaulted by two police officers, she knew that she needed to leave Argentina.

She first moved to Miami in 2000. She was undocumented, which did not allow her to find work at a hair salon. She turned to sex work again. After she was arrested several times in Miami, she decided to fully dedicate her life to sex work and live in the US as a sex worker. She changed her tactics to use the internet and media rather than working on the streets. She said that despite her hardships as an undocumented sex worker, it was better than life as a sex worker in Argentina. She said that she found a solid community of sex workers in Miami.

After five years in Miami, Gentili left and moved to New York City, where she began her work in activism. After witnessing friends being arrested in their own homes, she began working to decriminalize sex work in New York. She was granted asylum in 2011. She now works full time in advocacy work.

In 2018, she was featured in the FX series, Pose.