A 10-year legal battle waged by a transgender woman against an employer who refused to acknowledge her identity ended last year with a nearly $1 million settlement in her favor. She now vows to pay the experience forward. 

“Fight for your rights,” Diana Portillo said after her settlement. “And do not allow anybody to humiliate you.”

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The service rep was the victim of “taunts, laughter, ridicule, and harassment” by fellow employees.

Portillo filed suit against a Washington-area McDonald’s franchise in 2014, claiming workplace discrimination. Last October, a jury agreed that she was subjected to “a barrage of taunts, laughter, ridicule, and harassment because she is a transgender woman,” as described in her suit against the owners of the northwest DC restaurant.

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Portillo arrived in the U.S. in 2006 from El Salvador, which she fled not long after she was ambushed by a man who pointed a gun to her chin and demanded that she orally service him. The man threatened to harm Portillo or her family if she told anyone about the attack.

“In El Salvador, things are very polarized; black and white — if you are a man you have to look like a man,” Portillo shared in an interview with the Washington Post. “If you look like a woman but are a man, that’s not seen very well in the eyes of God. And they give you a hard time.”

Portillo started working at fast-food restaurants in the Washington area and taking English classes at a local library. She soon found community at La Clínica del Pueblo, a community health center that provides resources to new arrivals from Central America and elsewhere. 

Their Empodérate program, which caters to LGBTQ+ Latinos, serves about 500 people annually with services like free medical testing, connections to interpreters, and legal resources. Portillo became a regular at the clinic, where she met trans women undergoing hormone therapy. She shared that she could be trans, too. 

“They told me that I would be feeling a little bit fragile,” if and when she started to transition.

She did, and settled on a name honoring one of her heroes: Princess Diana.

“She didn’t mind picking up a child that maybe had HIV; she helped a lot of people who had lower resources,” Portillo said. “It makes me emotional to think about what her name represents.”

Two years earlier, Portillo started working at the McDonald’s franchise, where employees knew her as Gerardo and she was well-liked by management and co-workers.

But her transition was not well-received by either group. Both her bosses and co-workers continued to deadname her and grew more hostile as she tried to correct them even more so when she then complained to management.

Portillo reached out to Casa Ruby, a now-defunct LGBTQ+ nonprofit in D.C. founded and run by a Salvadoran trans woman. The group wrote a complaint to the store on Portillo’s behalf, describing the discrimination she faced while urging the staff to respect her name and gender preferences.

Instead, a supervisor told Portillo that no one at the workplace was obligated to call her Diana or recognize her gender identity. Emboldened after learning her complaints were going nowhere, co-workers continued to harass her, joking about her genitals and continuing to deadname her. She remembers arriving at the store in makeup and hearing co-workers exclaim, “The clown has arrived.”

“You are a guy,” a manager told her. “Your name is Gerardo. I am not going to complicate my life with you. You are going home,” he said, according to Portillo’s testimony.

“At the store, I found the same situation that I lived in El Salvador,” Portillo said at trial. Through tears on the witness stand, Portillo said, “I went to work every day praying to God to help me finish that day without losing it.”

Portillo was fired soon after, following her admission she was undocumented, a status several co-workers shared. The termination letter and false pretext were later used as evidence during the trial.

In October, the jury awarded Portillo a total of $930,000 for punitive damages and emotional distress.

Months earlier, Portillo gained asylum and soon took a new job at Empodérate, the community that had welcomed her with open arms so many years earlier. 

Now she’s giving back, helping young LGBTQ+ people navigate health insurance and their immigration status. She helps lead a peer support group that meets twice a week, and advises trans women in search of support and community.

Portillo says she pays special attention to “the newbies” and the ones harassed at school or work.

She reminds them they have rights — and to fight for them.

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