In Mexico, Castillo was rejected from job after job because she’s trans, before becoming a beautician. “I never wanted to be a cosmetologist or whatever, but there were no more options for me,” she told Broadly.

Lesly Herrera Castillo has perfect, long blond hair and flawless, mascaraed eyelashes. She’s a beauty expert, but, she said, she has always faced challenges working at beauty salons. Castillo is trans, and when she first moved from Mexico to the United States in 1999, she was undocumented.

Castillo went to beauty school and worked at salons in the city of Hermosillo, but eventually fled due to police violence. When she moved to New York at 29, surviving day to day wasn’t easy, recalls Castillo, especially since her Mexican cosmetology license wasn’t recognized in the US. After a few months, she landed a job at a beauty salon in Brooklyn through a friend. She has worked in salons ever since, but not without issue.

Castillo said she has frequently been treated as lesser than her salon colleagues for being trans. She remembers clients dropping hints that she didn’t know anything about women’s hair, or making repeated comments about her having large hands. She also said that former bosses held her to higher standards than her coworkers, especially those who were documented.

“When I talked to my boss [about my coworkers], I said, ‘Why do you let these people work here? They come in late. They don’t help with the cleaning,” she recalled. “But they had [cosmetology] licenses. Those ladies were born here. They were citizens. It was different.”

In 2014, Castillo received asylum status. That same year, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and breast cancer all at once. At various salon jobs she held in the following years, she says that she could never take a day off to see a doctor, was not allowed to leave early, and was constantly afraid she would be fired. “I never had time.”