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==