SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KTXL) — The 4th annual Transgiving took place amid a year of intensifying violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people.
“It’s still very conditional. They are comfortable within the four walls of our home, but in a community setting, they’ve still yet to come to recognize me as Anjali. And the preferred life I like to live,” said Anjali Rimi who is a transgender woman.
Rimi says it’s important for everyone to belong and spaces like Transgiving help with that.
“I wanted to be around family, and I was alone in my apartment. And I was crying,” transgender activist Ebony Ava Harper told FOX40.
According to the latest annual report by the Human Rights Campaign, there were 22 killings by November 18 and 91% of the people killed identified as black women.
One of the women killed in Texas, Muhlaysia Booker, was honored with a vigil in Sacramento. The vigil was in May and took place near a mural of another murdered transgender woman, Chyna Gibson.
Gibson was a performer from Sacramento who was killed in New Orleans in 2017.
“We live in a world hostile to our existence,” Harper said. “It doesn’t take much to have compassion for somebody else’s existence.”