Andrea Montanez: From Undercover Cartel Cop to Florida Trans Rights Activist
Andrea Montanez went head-to-head with Pablo Escobar. Now she’s taking on Ron DeSantis.
It is one of those April days in Florida that makes people want to move here — low 80s with no clouds in the bright-blue sky. In Orlando’s Magic Kingdom, children pose with princesses and wave their Magic Bands to board Space Mountain. About 16 miles away at the Orlando airport, I stand outside arrivals and wait to chase a different kind of thrill: a ride-along with Andrea Montanez, one of Florida’s most prominent trans activists, to a meeting of the state’s board of medicine.
I climb into her Nissan Sentra, which has a trans flag planted in the air vents and an “existir es resistir” sticker on the console. We had met the previous summer while I was in Florida to report on the new health-care restrictions facing trans adults. In May 2023, the Florida legislature enacted a bill barring youth access to gender-affirming care and severely restricting it for adults. Overnight, Montanez and an estimated 80 percent of Florida’s 94,900 trans adults — anyone who had obtained hormones from a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant — became unable to renew their prescription. Since then, hundreds had lost access to their medication altogether.
In this moment of crisis, Montanez — who came of age as a cartel cop in her native Colombia — began her charm offensive, working rooms around the state to win back what her community has lost. To do so, she has had to woo even her fiercest opponents, state reps infamous for calling trans people “mutants” and “demons” and “groomers.” And it’s not just legislators whom she’s had to convince: In other states, bans on hormones or surgery were enacted by elected officials, people in inherently political roles. In Florida, the ban was first enacted by the the board of medicine (BOM), a purportedly neutral administrative body. As with the takeover of New College before it, trans people had become the targets of DeSantis’s shadow state.
The board is required by statute to hold public hearings when making new rules. For the past year and a half, as each new anti-trans regulation has been discussed, Montanez has been crisscrossing the state to attend them. At tomorrow’s board meeting in Tampa, its members are set to finalize the consent forms that trans people are required to sign before obtaining gender-affirming care. A federal judge is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the restrictions any day, but activists cannot sit around and wait in the meantime.
As we pull out of the airport onto the freeway, Montanez tucks her bleach blonde hair behind her ear. Her expressive eyebrows are framed by translucent purple glasses. I ask her about tomorrow’s meeting. Is she nervous? She laughs and shakes her head. The board may be powerful, but she’s no stranger to a long fight. And nobody, not even Pablo Escobar, was taken down in one fell swoop.
When she was 5 years old, growing up in the mountain town of Manizales, Colombia, Montanez would sneak into her parents’ bedroom. There, she would hide in the closet, playing with her older sister’s Barbies and putting on eyeshadow from her mother’s makeup bag. The first time she was caught, her mom was furious. She smacked Montanez and demanded an explanation: “Why are you doing this?” Montanez did not know. She didn’t feel gay; she was attracted to women, yet also wanted to be a woman. The words “transgender woman” would not enter her lexicon for two decades.
She joined the Colombian military — “I was looking for a male career, to be a big guy” — and secured the most dangerous post she could: a narcotics officer in the campaign to take down Pablo Escobar. Soon, she was conducting raids and arrests, including in collaboration with the DEA and FBI. She also spent long periods undercover, learning to develop the right persona to gain trust or information. Montanez daydreamed about going undercover as a woman, like the female officers on her team.
Montanez daydreamed about going undercover as a woman, like the female officers on her team.
As an honest narcotics officer with ties to the U.S. government, Montanez’s life was under constant threat. In 1995, a friend from the police force told her he’d been offered a significant sum by the cartel to kill her. “I can say ‘no,’” she recalls him saying, “but all the agents next to me, they’re going to say ‘yes.’” It was a wake-up call. Montanez quit her job and joined British Petroleum as a security consultant. When Marxist guerillas kidnapped foreign oil workers, she served as a negotiator, figuring out how to save their lives.
Montanez laughs as she tells me her story, aware of how outrageous it all sounds. Eventually, it became too outrageous for her. She was now a civilian, married with two children, and needed to keep her family safe. In 2000, she brought her wife and youngest child to Miami and the family was granted asylum. Montanez says the DEA offered to hire her as an informant, but she declined. Instead, she took whatever odd jobs she could, making deliveries for a few years, later working as a private investigator. In 2010, she took a position with the TSA.
For years, Montanez worked her shifts at the Orlando airport, spent time with her family, and stole whatever moments she could to be herself. After she and her wife divorced in 2014, she started to get more adventurous, first wearing women’s clothing and braving the walk to her car, next driving to gay clubs and daring herself to enter. “I parked four or five times at Pulse but never went in,” she tells me wistfully.
As the years passed, she started to wonder if her life could look different — she saw more women like her walking through the airport on their way to somewhere new. Around 2018, she learned about a weekend retreat for crossdressers and trans people in Oklahoma. She flew across the country and spent two days living as a woman in public. When the weekend was over, she was devastated. How could she go back to the way things were before? Montanez started investigating the possibility of a medical transition and learned it was covered by the TSA. Around 2018, she saw a physician and was given her first hormone prescription. She took her first estrogen pill. At 52, she was beginning a new journey.
By 2020, Montanez had come out as transgender to her colleagues in the TSA and her family. She adopted the name of the first trans woman she ever met, back in Colombia at the age of 24, who encountered her as a male cop but saw through her façade and encouraged Montanez to explore her gender identity.
Once Montanez had come out, her life changed in other ways. She started visiting advocacy groups. Soon she was attending LGBTQ-rights rallies and speaking out about her experiences as a trans woman and immigrant. The work felt important, but engaging in advocacy wasn’t permitted as a federal employee. So she resigned from her job and became a full-time community organizer at an immigrants’-rights organization, the Hope CommUnity Center, a single-story building where we stop after leaving the airport. Flowers, butterflies, and rainbows dancing in the large-scale mosaic by the entrance.
Montanez had come into herself and community organizing at a time of increased attacks on trans rights. The march toward trans health equality, which had seemed inexorable just a few years earlier, was going off the rails. Across the country, politicians claimed they were seeking to protect children — but activists knew this was about controlling all trans life. Montanez felt the shifting political winds in the minutiae of her day. Not long ago, she could walk down the street without fear. Now, “people look at you differently,” she tells me. She was fearful of using public restrooms, fearful of being attacked. “You start to see that hate again.”
It wasn’t long before Florida’s attacks on gender-affirming care were directly targeting adults. In the spring of 2022, DeSantis asked the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), which oversees Florida’s Medicaid policy, to issue a report regarding whether it should cease covering gender-affirming care. The AHCA report, published in June 2022, falsely concluded that there was little evidence favoring gender-affirming care and called for youth and adult coverage to cease. (This exclusion was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by a federal court). The next month, a panel of subject-area experts lambasted the report as a “a document crafted to serve a political agenda.”
The board would would “only listen to the histories of detransitioners," one activist told me. The whole process was “bluntly, obviously rigged," said another.
Following the report, the DeSantis administration instructed the BOM to put its findings to use by imposing restrictions on gender-affirming care for all Floridians, not just those covered by Medicaid. First, the BOM needed to engage in a process called rulemaking, the BOM needed to hold public meetings to seek comment. Montanez started borrowing the van owned by Hope CommUnity Center to bring trans activists to board meetings all around the state where the proposed rules would be discussed.
The BOM, like AHCA, was supposed to make decisions based on the medical evidence. But right away, it was clear to Montanez and other activists that there was another agenda at hand. At the first board meetings where the rules were discussed, Moms for Liberty activists arrived by the busload, using their speaker time to call trans people “groomers” and accuse them of child genital mutilation. “It was intense and horrible,” recalls Montanez.
Of the many trans activists I polled, almost all singled out one October 2022 board meeting as the worst. Detransitioners, including Chloe Cole and Camile Kiefel, had been invited to testify and were the first to speak as soon as public comment began. By the end, aghast that so few trans-rights supporters had spoken, two state lawmakers walked up to the lectern to ask for more time. Suddenly, their mics were cut. The crowd began chanting “Let them speak!” to no avail. Montanez walked away from the meeting more certain than ever that the board wasn’t interested in the perspectives of every trans Floridian — it would “only listen to the histories of detransitioners.” The whole process was “bluntly, obviously rigged,” another activist told me.
In Colombia, Montanez had seen corruption penetrate deep into the heart of government. The cartel’s hold on law enforcement had even threatened her life. Now, she was confronting a different kind of shadow state, driven in this instance by a hunger not for money but for power. She found herself comparing the cartel members she’d once arrested and interrogated to the board members she faced in meeting after meeting: “Criminals learn because they don’t have other opportunities. The politicians? They have everything — they’re worse.”
We leave Hope CommUnity Center to meet Montanez’s friend Joey Knoll, a nurse practitioner with a blond mohawk who founded the LGBTQ-affirming clinic SPEKTRUM. Montanez drives through Orlando’s urban sprawl and tells stories from her days undercover: a standoff with an armed 12-year-old, rescuing a kidnapped baby. She had an insatiable desire for risk, and during a raid or police action, “I always wanted to be the first one. I was too crazy.”
“I never in my life thought about killing myself. But I think, indirectly, I was unhappy.”
Florida’s attack on gender-affirming care has been slow, tethered to bureaucracy and votes, but effective. By May 2023, BOM’s rules had been codified into law under a bill known as SB 254. Children could no longer access hormones or surgery, and adults could not be prescribed hormones by any health-care provider other than a physician.
With the new rules in force, Montanez and her fellow patients at SPEKTRUM scrambled. The phone rang off the hook with patients calling the office in distress, saying their HRT prescriptions had lapsed. (After a lawsuit was filed against SB 254, a federal judge temporarily enjoined the bill’s restrictions with regard to youth gender-affirming care, but the adult restrictions remained in force).
The board was now charged with creating emergency rules in accordance with the bill and producing “informed consent” forms trans people were required to sign before obtaining care. Montanez and other activists continued to attend each board meeting, hoping for any meager improvements they could wrest away. Anything they could do to make the policies better was worth trying.
One morning in the fall of 2023, as Montanez and her crew were hanging out in Starbucks before a board meeting, in walked Scot Ackerman, about five-two with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses that slid down his nose. Ackerman was an oncologist and then the chair of the board. He was also an active proponent of restrictions on gender-affirming care and had personally advocated in the Florida legislature for the passage of SB 254. Montanez saw him spot them and look down at the floor. He was debating what to do. After a moment, she walked up to him.
“Hello, doctor, how are you today?”
Ackerman started asking questions, fast and furious. “’How do you feel about castration?” she recalls him asking. Montanez was outraged that a physician would use that term so carelessly — would a doctor use the word castration to describe a surgery performed on cis men with testicular cancer? She felt her insides turn and her cheeks grow flushed. She forced a smile: “It’s not castration, it’s an orchiectomy, doctor.”
It was a brief encounter, but at the meeting later that day, he used the word orchiectomy for the first time instead of castration and pushed through small improvements to the forms — not a change that turned the tide, but a win nonetheless. And at each board meeting thereafter, he made an effort to greet Montanez and say he was glad she could come. They exchanged numbers. It seemed he was interested in getting to know her.
Knoll estimates that out of his 2500 patients, about 150 were without medicine, “and other patients, it’s just a matter of time before they run out.”
In July 2023, the emergency forms and rules went into effect. Montanez was distraught to see what the board had produced. The forms printed outright inaccuracies, such as the assertion that “medical treatment of people with gender dysphoria is based on very limited, poor-quality research.” Trans adults initiating hormones needed to sign or initial in nearly 40 separate places on the form, including next to an extensive, exaggerated list of potential risks. It was a play lifted directly from the anti-choice handbook: using regulatory regimes to spread fear and disinformation, create additional labor for providers, and make care more difficult to obtain.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit challenging SB 254 and the subsequent board rules was moving forward. In December 2023, the litigation went to trial. On the witness stand, board members defended the rules they had passed, claiming they were based on medical evidence, while actual experts in the field — specialists in gender-affirming care — insisted otherwise.
After three days, the trial was over and Montanez and thousands of trans Floridians awaited a ruling. Months passed with no news.
The board of medicine had still only passed emergency rules and informed consent forms. With the judicial ruling pending, they moved forward in holding additional public-comment meetings to issue final documents. The April meeting in Tampa would be Montanez’s last chance to push for improvements.
Over dinner at a Colombian restaurant nearby, Knoll tells me the latest at his clinic. He estimates that out of his 2,500 patients, about 150 were without medicine — “and other patients, it’s just a matter of time before they run out.” Since 254 came into effect, SPEKTRUM had been forced to close one of its two clinic sites. “I feel like I’m complicit with it,” Knoll tells me, “just because I’m trying to be compliant with the law.” Trans men were menstruating again. Trans women were experiencing unwanted hair growth and spontaneous erections. Some patients had opted out of the prescription system altogether, opting instead to buy their medications underground, exposing themselves to an unregulated supply. Nobody really knew what they were getting or if it was safe.
The next morning, Montanez and her fellow activists pile into a minivan. She’s dressed in the combat uniform she’s developed for board meetings: a jean jacket embroidered with flowers and covered in queer- and immigrants’-rights pins, including a button demanding “trans equality NOW.” It’s go time.
As we drive, the playlist pumping Olivia Rodrigo’s “all-american bitch,” Montanez talks through the email she received that morning from Simone Chriss, one of the lawyers litigating the case against the board of medicine. Chriss had outlined all the changes to the forms that the board would be considering at the meeting. One proposal, put forward by a consultant hired by the board, would require trans adults to see both a mental-health provider and an endocrinologist just to obtain hormones — making it even harder and more expensive to obtain care.
Once we arrive, we hang out in the sterile conference-room lobby. Montanez buzzes around the space introducing me to everybody, including Tristan Byrnes, a 53-year-old trans man and licensed mental-health counselor who has many clients affected by the new rules. He too has attended many board meetings where it seems like none of the doctors are listening. Still, he says, “we’re going to fight the fight.”
Then the meeting begins. For nearly three hours, the board sits in a semicircle facing an audience of trans activists, the two groups separated by a rope. They debate how frequently trans youth should be required to get blood work done — three months or six months? — and whether a longer addendum should be attached castigating WPATH, the world’s leading transgender-medicine association. The notion of requiring trans adults to obtain endocrinologist and mental-health-care referrals is scuttled on technical grounds.
At the break, Montanez rises to stretch her legs. Soon enough, Ackerman ambles over toward us. I introduce myself and he gestures toward Montanez. “We’re besties!” he says of Montanez with a smile. She wastes no time sharing the latest from Knoll about the disastrous impact of the rules on trans adults. He listens for a few minutes before scurrying back into the meeting room for the public-comment period.
I had hoped to see Montanez in action before the board, but she isn’t called to the podium. Byrnes tells the board he was miserable and suicidal before he transitioned in his early 30s. Since then, “I have gotten a graduate degree, I have gotten married, I have adopted children, I have a life I am happy with,” he tells them. “And so to say there’s no efficacy in transition?” The doctors follow glumly, only a handful making eye contact.
When the meeting ends, Montanez and Ackerman pose for photos — she clasping a trans flag against her chest and holding a “What a Gift to Be Trans” sign between the two of them. “Some people say, ‘I can’t believe it — how do you do that if you hate Ackerman?’ I don’t love him either!” But she is a strategist, and it’s clear that Ackerman respects her. “I say, ‘How can I use that respect to our advantage?’” Shortly after we depart, she gets a text from Ackerman asking for other shots of them together. We laugh, this time a little less easily.
Later I call Ackerman on the phone to ask him about his connection to Montanez. What has it been like to develop a rapport with Montanez while hearing how the board’s rules have limited her access to life-saving and life-affirming care? “What Andrea thinks is best for her may not be what is best for her,” he tells me. “We restrict access for all sorts of things because we don’t think it’s good medicine.”
On June 11, Montanez woke to a flurry of messages in the SPEKTRUM chat. The judge had ruled that SB 254 and the board of medicine’s rules were unconstitutional and permanently enjoined the restrictions.
After learning about the ruling, Montanez’s first text was to Ackerman. She sent him a copy of the ruling with a brief note: “This is great news for us — I don’t know if you’re aware.” His response was quick and brief: a thumbs-up emoji.
She and I spoke the next morning. “This is a national hope. A ruling from a federal judge can change things for everybody,” she told me. But the fight isn’t over. “It’s a victory. It’s not the war we’re winning here, they have the right to appeal.” Which is exactly what the state did on June 18. In the meantime, most SPEKTRUM patients who had lost access to hormones have been able to renew their prescription, Knoll says, while others waiting to initiate hormones have finally been able to take their first dose.
In Florida, there’s always another flight. Montanez’s next battle is over the DMV restrictions barring trans people from updating their gender marker on their license. She just took a job as a field organizer for the National LGBQ Task Force. Now she spends her weeks flying from state to state, meeting with trans activists engaged in similar struggles. On June 30, she’ll be on the main float at NYC Pride, standing alongside movement icon Miss Major.
Her days of being armed 24/7 are long gone, but Montanez is still vibrating with the energy of battle, with the thrill of confrontation, with the people she’s won over, the “magic of trans people” that she says feeds and drives her. In her quest to take down the DeSantis shadow state, she will fight for trans Floridians inch by inch.
“That’s the way you win the war.”
Related