Silvia Reyes

Silvia Reyes Plata (1949 – 22 May 2024) was a Spanish transgender activist linked with Barcelona's LGBT movement. She took part in the historic Barcelona 1977 pride parade, held on 26 June that year. It was the first great act of LGBT visibility in Spain, and was peaceful until police opened fire with rubber bullets.

Life At the age of 17, Reyes was awarded a scholarship to study medicine, but she could not begin her course of studies because her teachers told her that if she wanted to go to university, she could not pluck her eyebrows, and she would also have to dress like a man.

Reyes arrived in the Catalonian capital in 1973, four months after having ended her military service. She sought work in hotels, given her experience over the last seven years, but Reyes, who had begun her hormone therapy in 1974 "with products that I was buying at a pharmacy", was systematically rejected for having a female appearance and a male name.

Late in 1974 she was detained in yet another raid and taken to La Model, a prison in Barcelona, for being a transvestite; she was later taken to Carabanchel Prison in Madrid, and later still to a centre for "social rehabilitation" (that is to say, to be cured of homosexuality) in Badajoz, which lasted for six months. and in the end, she went to live in Paris, where she found work performing in a nightclub, which allowed her to dedicate herself to show business, and which for ten years led her to live in various places in France, Belgium and Switzerland. She stopped working in 2003 and returned to Barcelona, never to live anywhere else again. In the jails, detention centres and social rehabilitation centres, she suffered much humiliation and mistreatment;

Recognition In 2017, Reyes participated in the Jezebel Productions' documentary Bones of Contention about LGBTQ repression during the Franco era in Spain. The film premiered in the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and was released in Spain under the title PERO QUE TODOS SEPAN QUE NO HE MUERTO. She also appeared in the 2019 documentary Crits de llibertat ("Cries of Freedom") together with other LGBT activists from Catalan-speaking regions, among them Jordi Griset, Maria Giralt, Paulina Blanco, Armand de Fluvià and Nazario. Their testaments appear in Extremaduran journalist Raúl Solís's book La doble transición (2019), together with other transsexual women who raised their voices against the Franco régime's and the transition era's repression.