SACRAMENTO, Calif. — June is Pride month worldwide, a time for members of the LGBTQ community and supporters to celebrate progress made toward equality and safety. It's also an opportunity to highlight the work that still needs to be done, and this year's Pride month is about to start on a tragic note.
People gathered Thursday beneath a mural painted on the back of Sacramento’s Lavender Library, memorializing Chyna Gibson. Gibson was a Sacramento transgender performer murdered in 2017 in New Orleans.
She is hardly the most recent trans woman killed in this country. Less than two weeks ago, Muhlaysia Booker was shot and killed in Texas, a month after her brutal public beating was caught on camera.
The Sacramento LGBTQ community held a memorial for Booker under the Gibson mural last week. They returned Thursday — this time for the brutal death of a trans woman in Mexico.
"You've got to stop killing us,” said Bianca Lucrecia, a longtime transgender activist. "We have a right to live in this world."
She told ABC10 she wants allies in the straight community to step up.
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"We need your protection,” she said. “We cannot do it alone because there's too much violence against us."
Christina Arias agrees.
"As a trans woman of color immigrant, it's very important,” she said.
Arias lost two best friends — also trans women — to murder. She's now helping people like her through the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, where she works as bilingual outreach coordinator.
"It's been a long process, but right now I feel happy to be here in a better place,” she said.
While California is seen as a leader in LGBTQ rights and protections, inequality still exists, said David Heitstuman, Sacramento LGBT Community Center executive director
"Unfortunately, the reality, if you want to access healthcare or you want to send your child to school or you want to get a job, your options can still be very limited as a queer, trans person, especially as a person of color,” Heitstuman said.
That discrimination isn’t always obvious, he added.
"There's not always a, 'Oh, I don't want to serve you because you're trans,'” he explained. “It's more, 'I don't know how to deal with that' or 'I don't know enough about that,' and people really need to take the time to educate themselves."
The internet is a great place to start, he recommended.
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For Sacramento Rev. Pamela Anderson, learning took friendships and a class at her church.
"I was one of those people, where I was like, 'I just don't understand this whole transgender thing,'" she confessed.
Then, she said, she went to church with a lot of trans members, where they started a class called "Trans 101."
"So then I could go, 'You know what, let's just have conversations because I'm really trying to understand this,’” Anderson said.
She encourages people to open their hearts even if they don't fully understand.
"It's about seeing one another. We are human beings,” she said.
As Arias explained, “We want to live in peace, we want to have families. We are as normal as any other person."
Sacramento Pride is the weekend of June 7 to June 9. The march starts at 11 a.m. Sunday at Southside Park. Arias will be in a group carrying signs with the names of trans people killed in the U.S. and Latin America in the last year.
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