Woods, the Oakland Police Department LGBTQ liaison, said she prepares herself to read the names of people she knows on the list of the year’s victims before each Transgender Day of Remembrance.

“If you run a transgender program anywhere, anywhere in the world, I can honestly say almost anywhere in the world, it’s not a matter of if somebody is going to get killed, it’s when,” Woods said.

Since 2016, at least 66 transgender people have been murdered in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign. A News21 analysis found more than half of the victims were people of color and at least 29 of the cases are still under investigation.

Only one case was classified as a hate crime by law enforcement, even when LGBTQ advocates and victims’ communities argued they were targeted for their gender identity.

Transgender victims’ cases are frequently complicated by the circumstances surrounding their deaths, which makes it difficult to classify their homicides as hate crimes. The victims are often killed by a romantic partner, sex work client or stranger.

“It’s important to remember that hate crimes occur in all sorts of different contexts. I think people often, when they think about them, they immediately go to something on a street outside a gay bar with a bunch of young men,” said anti-LGBTQ hate crimes expert Gregory Herek. “It’s a common scenario, but hate crimes are also committed in families, in the home, in schools, in the workplace and by all sorts of people.”

China Gibson, a 31-year-old African-American transgender woman, was shot in the back between eight and 10 times while exiting a shopping center in New Orleans in February 2017. Gibson’s mother, Tammie Lewis, and her sister, Iona Maxie, believe the murderer was a lover who hoped to conceal his sexual relationship with Gibson to avoid questions regarding his sexuality.

“I think China was killed because people want to live a certain lifestyle, but then have a closeted lifestyle that they don’t want to be outed about,” Maxie said. “China was a person, when she met men, she told them exactly who she was, and you have to decide going forward if that’s what you want to be a part of whether people find out or not. I just think the person just didn’t want people to find out. And that’s why China was killed.”

The New Orleans Police Department officers who responded to Gibson’s shooting did not categorize her murder as a hate crime in the incident report. In subsequent statements, law enforcement officials have said the murder is not being considered a hate crime.

Kevin Griffin, Gibson’s cousin, said while the details surrounding her murder are ambiguous, there’s little reason Gibson would have been targeted, making her gender identity a potential motive in her killing.

“This is one of those people who would give you the shirt off their back. People say that, because it’s cliché and cool, but this was the person China was,” Griffin said. “Would not do any harm to anyone. She just wanted to be who she was and she didn’t want any static or any friction so she wouldn’t give it.”

Even if law enforcement found Gibson’s killer and confirmed a gender identity bias motive in her murder, the ability to pursue hate crime charges on a state level is limited in Louisiana. While the state’s hate crime statute defines sexual orientation-based crimes as hate crimes, there is no such provision for gender bias-based crimes, leaving little legal recourse other than federal hate crime charges.

Other states like Louisiana without gender identity provisions have seen the most murders of transgender individuals in recent years. Since 2016, eight transgender people have been killed in Texas, six in Florida, and five in Ohio and Georgia. Seven transgender women were murdered in Louisiana during that time.

In states that can pursue hate crime charges in gender identity cases, justice is not always a guarantee.

California has hate crime and non-discrimination laws that cover individuals targeted for their gender identity or gender expression, but the state’s transgender population is still vulnerable.

Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, a 36-year-old transgender Latina woman from San Francisco, was stabbed to death in her apartment complex in February 2015. Neighbors reported hearing an argument between Taja and a man, and called the police, said Linda DeJesus, Taja’s mother.

When first responders arrived at the scene, they found Taja in the stairwell. She had been stabbed nine times and was pronounced dead. By the time officers found the man, who fled the apartment, he had committed suicide, DeJesus said.

Although DeJesus believes the murder was a hate crime, it wasn’t classified as such by investigators. She told News21 that detectives said the suspect, who was going through a divorce, was trying to reconcile with his ex-wife.

“They considered it an argument that got escalated, got out of control,” DeJesus said. “He killed her, and in my heart I believe that no, he didn’t want anyone to know that he was with a transgender woman.”

Before transgender individuals are victims of fatal violence, they can face a number of factors that put them at higher risk for hate, murder and discrimination.

A 2011 report published by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, two national LGBTQ advocacy groups, found more than 1,100 of the over 6,000 transgender respondents reported being homeless at some point. More than 950 said they had to find alternative sources of income, like drug trafficking or sex work, to survive.

Before she was killed, Taja was struggling to get by, and had turned to sex work to survive, her friend and sobriety sponsor Danielle Castro told News21. She said she ran into Taja while going home from work about two weeks before she died.

“I took her home to Bayview where she lived. She wanted me to see her place and the area felt unsafe, but we went inside and she had bare minimum,” Castro said. “I could tell she was really struggling.”

Among the challenges the transgender community faces, there’s also a lack of trust in law enforcement. The National Center for Transgender Equality survey reported that almost 3,000 respondents said they were uncomfortable reaching out to the police for help.

Woods, who trains Oakland Police Department officers to work with the LGBTQ population, said most law enforcement officers have a “very limited” perspective on the transgender community. Most, Woods said, only engage with transgender folks in an emergency response capacity or when a transgender individual is committing a crime.

Castro, who is also a transgender woman, told News21 she had a bad experience with police officers days after Taja DeJesus’ funeral.

Castro said she was sitting in front of a bar in the Castro District, a gay neighborhood in San Francisco, while a march against transphobia took place. The bar manager came out and told Castro to leave. When she refused, he shoved her.

“He was saying transphobic things, and I couldn’t believe that he put his hands on me and was so forceful when I was obviously disabled,” said Castro, who was dealing with hip problems at the time.

The manager called the police, and Castro said the officers refused to take her statement.

“The police came and they were awful. Just awful,” Castro said. “I wanted to file charges, but they said they couldn’t do a police report there because it was out of their district.”

Castro said she later found out the officers had lied to her, and could have done a police report there.

Of the 39 closed transgender murder cases recorded by the Human Rights Campaign since 2016, only one had hate crime charges filed by the local district attorney’s office. The police involved did not say if they investigated the case as a hate crime homicide.

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Before a New York judge sentenced Rasheen Everett to 29 years in prison for strangling Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar in 2010, his lawyer pleaded for a lighter punishment. According to him, Gonzalez-Andujar wasn’t on the “higher end of the community.”   

In January, Los Angeles police charged Kevyn Ramirez in the stabbing death of Viccky Gutierrez, who was stabbed to death before Ramirez allegedly burned her home, leaving her remains severely burned. Police couldn’t immediately identify her.

All of them were transgender cases in the news. All of them were sex workers. And none of their murders were initially charged as hate crimes.

LGBTQ advocates say society shuns transgender people from corporate jobs because of their gender identity, forcing them into survival sex work and other means of underground economy. But that places them in a dangerous trade.

According to the Trans Murder Monitoring Project, 62 percent of the 2,609 transgender people killed worldwide from January 2008 through September 2017 were sex workers.

In the United States, a 2015 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality said one in five transgender adults surveyed said they participated in sex work, with higher rates among minority women. Of the 53 transgender people killed between 2013 and 2015, 34 percent participated in sex work at the time of their deaths, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Of the 14 transgender murders tracked by the Human Rights Campaign this year, at least two victims participated in sex work.

“It’s a nationwide problem that is happening all across the country and it is a direct result of transphobia and hate crimes, as well as the reasons that lead trans people to be in vulnerable situations,” said Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán, the trans and gender non-conforming justice project director for the National LGBTQ Task Force.

When transgender people feel they have no other avenue for income, they often sell their bodies, Rodríguez-Roldán said. Sex work can be defined as prostitution, pornography, services arranged online and other forms. Experts say prejudices in the workplace and housing lead transgender people to this point.

Currently, 28 states lack explicit laws prohibiting employment and housing discrimination regarding sexual orientation or gender identity. In 2015, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found nearly 50 percent of transgender sex worker respondents experienced homelessness. Nearly 70 percent of respondents reported losing a job or being denied a promotion because of their identity.  

When they can’t secure a house or employment, transgender people feel they have no other choice but to partake in a dangerous craft such as sex work, said Kory Mansen, racial and economic justice policy advocate for the National Center for Transgender Equality.

“When you combine those factors, you get an amplified violence that these people experience at the intersection of that area of work and the trans identity,” he said.

Danielle Castro knows those factors too well because she’s lived it. Now, the 43-year-old Latina transgender woman enjoys a stable lifestyle. She lives in a house in Oakland, California with her two dogs. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at John F. Kennedy University, which is in the Bay Area.  She’s also project director at the Center for Excellence for Transgender Health.

But she participated in sex work for years before and after her transition into a female. When she hears horror stories of transgender sex workers’ murders, it resonates because “it could have been me,”she said.

“The reasons so many of us are engaging in sex work is because we don’t have other options to survive,” she said. “When you have a power to survive, that’s what you’re going to do. And when you get positive reinforcement from people that want to have sex with you and pay you, I’m not going to lie, it feels good.

“The sad part about it, though, is that people think we’re disposable because of it.”

Experts and data suggest transgender sex workers generally distrust law enforcement. Eighty-six percent of transgender sex worker respondents reported being harassed, attacked, sexually assaulted or mistreated in some way by police, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. Add the fact that the more lucrative sex work acts, such as prostitution, are illegal, and it deters transgender sex workers from approaching police to report violence.  

“What often happens is sex workers are disproportionately subject to crimes, but they’re less likely to report them because they’re afraid of retaliation on the part of police officers,” said Sheryl Evans Davis, executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. “And we’ve heard anecdotally that, ‘I was robbed and I went to report it to a police officer and the police officer asked me, oh, were you doing sex work?’ So there was this victimizing the victim dynamic that was happening.”

When reported crimes happen, though, it’s harder to convict perpetrators of a hate crime, experts say. A hate crime charge automatically increases a typical punishment for states with applicable laws.

In Gonzalez-Andujar’s and Williams’ brutal murders, hate crime charges weren’t brought. Law enforcement couldn’t definitively prove motivation, according to news reports.

Gutierrez’s death, though still under investigation, was not immediately charged as a hate crime.  

For transgender sex workers, other issues complicate proving a hate crime, and each case is unique. It is hard to prove victims were explicitly targeted for their gender, or if other circumstances, such as domestic violence, led to their deaths or mistreatment, Mansen said

“It is so difficult to get things tried as a hate crime because there are a lot of factors into proving the intent, so more often than not law enforcement doesn’t feel equipped to make the determination of whether something is or is not a hate crime,” Mansen said.

Of the four transgender sex worker deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign in 2015, none were charged as hate crimes.

Often, after a hate crime charge isn’t levied, the transgender community sees it as a failure.

As the leader of an advocacy group who works closely with the LGBTQ community and police, Davis said she sees both sides.

“It’s a really tough and emotional debate,” Davis said. “With most crimes, you have to prove the intent. But with hate crimes, you have to prove the intent, the act and then the motivation to do it.”

“There have been these moments when people are calling it out there in the streets and they’re saying that, ‘this is a hate crime’ and there’s a struggle with proving it.”

Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán agreed, saying the intricacies of each situation make it difficult to label each case hate-related. But to her, the biggest goal should be fixing the systemic issue that leads to these events.

“I think it’s a mix of many things that makes this so complex, often because they’re trans, often because they’re vulnerable in engaging in criminalized form of making a living,” she said. “But I’m not sure it matters. What matters is transgender people are being murdered.”

In recent years, LGBTQ advocacy groups publicly called for decriminalization of sex work, though federal legislation to crackdown on online services passed this year. Advocates say while national policy battles continue, local communities can take action. And two cities are leading the charge.

Sophie Cadle, a 23-year-old youth liaison at the New York Transgender Advocacy Group, said her organization now works more with police to build relationships and help officers understand the societal factors involved with sex work. As a black transgender woman who participated in sex work, she said it’s important to be proactive.

“The violence toward the community is visible,” she said. “It’s there and it’s a continuous issue that’s affecting us.”

In San Francisco, sex workers who report experiencing or seeing violence won’t face prostitution charges because of a policy adopted in January by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and the San Francisco Police Department.  The ‘Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers’ is the first of its kind in the nation, and is a collaborative effort to encourage reporting of violent crime.

Corinne Greene, policy coordinator for the Transgender Law Center, said this should build trust. Proving intent regarding hate crimes will always be tough. But if sex workers can courageously approach police, she said, it will help reduce deaths and mistreatment.

“A big factor in how law enforcement can improve is learning about trans people, gaining cultural competence on trans people, learning about sex workers, investigating and trying to eliminate inherent bias most people have against trans people and sex workers not engaging in profiling,” she said. “Really focusing on improving community relations would be huge in terms of helping sex workers feel more comfortable accessing police.”

Danielle Castro has advice for people who are in the sex business.

“I hope people are safe and learn to protect themselves before they come into this trade that can be potentially deadly,” she said. “And if you’re doing it for survival, then God bless you.”

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