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Alyx Carr, whom I met long ago while doing a profile of Samuel L.
Jackson, and Guadarrama, who is Mexican American and makes one-
of-a-kind eveningwear out of upcycled textiles.
As Indya speaks, the room grows hushed, and remains that way for
the six hours it takes for her to tell the story of the 10 years between
when she left her home and entered foster care at age 14 and now. Her
voice rings out clear, demanding attention, as if she is speaking not just
to me, or to the handful of people present, but to the global audience
she knows is on the other side of my tape recorder. No one leaves the
room, or checks a cell phone, or even whispers to one another, as if the
work of today is to help this woman from the most marginalized of
marginalized groups carry the burden of her experiences.
“I don’t know how to have fun,” she begins, explaining that trying to
survive while embracing her identity has been such a relentless struggle,
she hasn’t had time to concentrate on anything else. “I don’t know what
my favorite restaurant is,” she says. “When I’m around people having
conversations about their day, I’m looking at them, like, ‘What could
they possibly be talking about? How are we not talking about decon-
structing white supremacy right now? How are we not trying to save
trans people?’” She goes on. “I don’t know who I am outside of someone
who’s just trying to be free and find safety for myself and for others.”
She was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, with a Puerto Rican teen mom
and Catholic immigrant father from the Dominican Republic, she says
as she slips off her Louis Vuitton combat boots
and pulls her knees to her chest. When Indya
started displaying feminine behaviors, her par-
ents “overdisciplined” her, she says.
“Because I was assigned male at birth, they
expected me to be masculine or to perform the
way they thought young boys should perform.
And I did not.” The more she expressed her
feminine self, the harsher the punishments
got. “They didn’t understand. They had never
experienced what it was like to have a family
member who was genderqueer.”
Speaking to me later on the phone, her
mother, Gloria, cries recalling Indya’s teenage
years. “I wanted her to accept who she was.
‘You were born a male, and that’s who you are:
a male,’” Gloria says. She was scared for her
youngest child’s safety. In Gloria’s work as a
nursing attendant, she’d treated a trans patient in the hospital who’d
had no visitors. She’d watched one relative grow suicidal with depres-
sion and worried that would be Indya’s fate. So she erred on the side of
overprotection until the tension reached a breaking point and Indya,
at age 14, entered the foster system.
“A lot of times, when parents overdiscipline their children, especially
when they’re queer, their intention isn’t to hurt them,” Indya says. “They
think they’re saving their children from harm. But they don’t realize
that they’re causing harm, that they’re doing to their kids exactly what
they’re afraid of the world doing to them.”
She went in and out of so many foster homes and courts and group
homes that the chronology gets mixed up in her mind. The purpose of
leaving her mother’s home was to gain the space to explore her identi-
ty, and the first place she landed was with a man who had locks on the
inside of his apartment. “He meant well,” she says, “but it was really
hot in the summer and he didn’t have AC, so I would get heat rashes.”
She started going to an after-school program at the Bronx Commu-
nity Pride Center. It was there that she first saw a trans woman, none
other than her future Pose cast member Dominique Jackson. Jackson’s
character, Elektra Abundance, is what’s known as a “house mother,” the
matriarch of a self-selected family of queer outcasts who compete as a
group, vogueing down a runway in fabulous outfits at balls.
“She was not the typical 13-year-old,” Jackson recalls. “Most were
crying and begging for help. She knew where she was going. At that
age, she already knew what she wanted, which was to be herself and
for people to recognize that being her was not a bad thing.”
Fate soon landed Indya with a foster parent who happened to be a
trans woman, and she let Indya try out hormone replacement therapy
using her own supply. “I remember not feeling as sad,” Indya says. “I
just felt more connected to my body. I felt free. I felt attractive. I liked
the way I looked in the mirror.” She started posting pictures of herself
on social media, and felt validated by comments, both from people she
knew and didn’t know, who told her she was beautiful. Then one day,
her foster mom decided to stop giving her the hormones, forcing Indya
to find ways to buy them online.
A message came through Facebook from some people in a nearby
area. “They told me that they had a lot of friends who were trans and
they wanted to help me in my process. And that they could help me to
get the money that I needed to be a woman,” Indya says. “Such a weird
sentence, right?” Indya takes a drag from a “spliffie” she’s rolled from
tobacco and non-THC cannabis she keeps in her bag. Smoking helps
her relax as she does the hard work of explaining to a cisgender person
like me the very specific traumas of her life.
She accepted the invitation of these strangers, she says, “and they
told me that all I had to do was play with these men who will come in for
a moment to see me and play with me and then they’ll give me money.”
Indya speaks in a soft monotone, as if blocking emotion from enter-
ing her words. The silence in the room grows heavier.
“So I said, ‘Okay,’” she continues, “and I did that. I stayed with them,
and they had men come over and have sex with
me.” They taught her to use protection and told
her she was safe because they would stay in
the room to watch as it happened. In exchange
for that protection and for getting her clients
through an ad they placed on Craigslist’s per-
sonals section (which was shut down in 2018),
they’d take a cut of her profits. “They told me I
needed to do it continuously so that I could af-
ford hormones,” she says. She was 16 years old.
“I didn’t understand what sex trafficking was
at the time,” she says. “The language I knew was
that they were, basically, my pimps. I was just a kid.”
Over a year into working for them, she found
herself bloodied and beaten in a dispute over
her hormone therapy. She carries the memory
of that day in the form of a small scar on her
cheek. “I remember thinking, ‘You messed up
my face,’” she says. “Feeling like I wouldn’t be able to make money
anymore because the way they showed me how to do it was the only
way I understood that I could.”
A boyfriend in the Bronx and his mother took her in. She wanted to
repay their kindness, so, she says, “Whenever they didn’t have money,
I secretly sold myself online to bring money and food to the house.”
What followed were more foster homes; a police record; time in
prison on Rikers Island on an assault charge from a fight with a boy-
friend; a stint in an institution where she was misgendered, taken off her
hormones, and given antidepression medication; and a drug addiction.
She escaped to foster care in a group home, only to be placed among
LGBTQ boys rather than in an all-girls unit, as she’d begged them to do.
Bullying was incessant, even worse than what she’d endured in high
school before dropping out in tenth grade. Her sister, the one member
of her family who hadn’t shunned her, began to grow distant.
“I was just really alone,” Indya says. “I didn’t have anybody.” She
wrote a note apologizing to everyone she loved and attempted to hang
herself. The rope snapped. And whether she wanted to or not, she says,
“I survived.”
Sometimes, Indya says, she has dreams so vivid she wakes up thinking
they’re real: “I’ve been dreaming every single day for the last month.”
Dreams, so elusive for a trans kid of color growing up in foster care,
somehow propelled her outside the tent for New York Fashion Week in
- “I remember just standing there at the entrance, seeing celebrities
walk into this big hall, and just hoping that a
“I FELT
MORE CONNECTED
TO MY BODY.
I FELT FREE.
I FELT ATTRACTIVE.
I LIKED THE
WAY I LOOKED.”
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KATCRAWFORD&COPR
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