She crossed the Rio Grande as an undocumented, transgender woman, fleeing after a serial sexual assault left her in shame and fearing for her life.

Now, 15 years later, Andrea Molina is director of the Organización Latina de Trans de Texas (Latin Organization of Texas Trans), which she founded after being expelled from the bathroom of a Latino organization in Houston. She and her co-founders, all trans women, decided that if they didn't take control of their destiny, no one was going to do it for them, she said.

The organization is the only one in Texas dedicated to empower, educate and develop leadership for transgender Hispanics, among the most stigmatized individuals in the LGBT community.

Being a transgender woman, a Latina and an undocumented immigrant is "like having a legion of stigmas against you," Molina said.

"I remember when I was a boy," Molina said. "I loved to be alone in the bathroom playing with a towel on my head and feeling like I had long hair. My cousins mocked me when we were together, and I would cover myself, wrapping a towel around my chest - instead of from the waistline as they used to do."

She vividly remembers the horror of being sexually assaulted by four male students she thought were her friends.

Your browser does not support the iframe HTML tag. Try viewing this in a modern browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer 9 or later.

It was during one of those Fridays that she used to go party after finishing a hectic week of engineering studies at the Technical University of Matamoros, Mexico.

Molina had confided to them that she was going through her hormonal treatment to become the woman she felt she was since her childhood. They decided to teach her a lesson about what it means to be a woman.

"'Ah, you think you are a woman? Then we have to teach you how to make sex like a woman,'" she remembers them saying.

"Two of them forced me down on my knees. I resisted. I cried and said, 'No. ... You are my friends.' "

They put a pistol to her head and demanded oral sex.

"I thought it was going to be my last day," she said.

She never returned to school. Instead, feeling ashamed, unworthy and guilty, without understanding why, she headed for the border a few months later.

"The interception of being a Latina, a trans and an undocumented person is a combination that could be triple times more grave in terms of stigmatization," said Janet Quezada, spokesperson for a national gay and lesbian advocacy group that goes by the acronym GLAAD.

While the stigmatization exists everywhere, Quezada said, it's "more prevalent in states like Texas because of their closeness to the border and their larger population of trans escaping from abuses they face in countries like Mexico and from Central America."

Mexico, for example, has laws protecting LGBT people. Still, transgender people suffer atrocities and abuses, including by law enforcement officers, as documented by the Transgender Law Center and the Cornell University Law School LGBT Clinic in a study released this year.

'Beaten down'

Several cases of slaying and dismembering of transgender women have been reported in Mexico, and the murder rate has increased since 2008. High-profile cases include the murder of a trans woman who headed the Special Unit for Attention to Members of the LGBT Community of the Attorney General Office in Mexico City.

That's what drove Jessica Trolinger to Houston. She described the terror she felt after four of her transgender friends, who were roommates, suddenly disappeared without a trace after being threatened by men in their neighborhood in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.

"Nobody knows still today what happened to them, not even their families," Trolinger said. "And families in Mexico are afraid to report cases because we are also abused by officers; I was once beaten down to the floor and mocked by an officer while others watched and laughed."

Trolinger admits that she's worked as a prostitute.

"But you have to be in my shoes to understand what it means to be a trans woman, trying to work a decent job to put food on the table, and being rejected by everyone," she said. "Employers don't like trans workers. And that is true in Mexico and here."

The Rev. Michel Díaz, former director of Connections at Houston's Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church, agrees that being transgender and Latina is difficult.

"Transgender women who are Latinas face a lot of challenges," said Díaz, who is finishing an MBA program. "They are probably the most vulnerable community among the vulnerables."

Several studies report their challenges. Many Hispanic transgender people suffer severe poverty with five times higher likelihood of living with an income of $10,000 or less per year than the overall Latino average.

As many as 47 percent of them have attempted suicide, as opposed to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population, reported the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task.

More than half of Hispanic trans people who are employed in the U.S. report being harassed at work, and between 14 and 16 percent have reported sexual and physical assaults.

'We are human beings'

For those who came as undocumented immigrants fleeing from their countries, they confront enormous obstacles in obtaining legal refuge in the U.S., said Frances Valdez, an immigration lawyer in Houston.

Unable to legalize their immigrant status, and scared to return to the threat of death in their countries of origin, these immigrants get entangled with a detention system where they account for only 1 of every 500 detainees but represent 1 out of every 5 of the confirmed cases of sexual assaults that occur in detention, according to GLADD.

After the mass shooting earlier this month at a gay dance club in Orlando, Fla., in which 49 people were killed, Díaz said, "There is an increased sense in the community of losing the already scarce places they have to feel safe and sheltered from being stigmatized and abused."

And there are only a handful of groups like the Latin Organization of Texas Trans in the country targeting the challenges and needs in the intersection of transgender and Latino issues, Quezada said.

Most days, the organization's offices are a blur of activity. They invite experts to talk about their health, legal, psychological and family issues. They organize workshops on leadership and self-esteem development. Every Wednesday, they watch and discuss films related to LGBT themes.

One of the accomplishments of the organization, Quezada said, is that it is developing a model of self-sufficiency.

"We struggle to finance our organization with our membership and fundraising," Molina said. "We welcome support for the society, but we are not waiting for others to educate and empower ourselves."

All Molina is hoping for is acceptance.

"We are human beings. We have value," she said. "We only ask from others to understand that we have the right to define ourselves and that they are privileged just by the fact that they don't have to face our struggles.

"Do you really think that being a transgender person is something that we chose? No, nobody chose to be the most discriminated and misunderstood people that exist."