“We’re in a time where we have folks coming out and reclaiming that term of two-spirit and stepping into those roles and finding ways that we can heal our people,” Viera said. “That’s something that I think that we’re working on as a community.”

However, regardless of where trans people live in the United States, they often face discrimination within health care. That includes being denied insurance coverage for routine sexual or reproductive screenings that are still treated as women’s health issues like Pap smears and mammograms, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Others must teach their medical providers about trans people in order to receive proper care. Often they are asked invasive questions.

Society has still not accepted transgender people as powerful and deserving of humanity, Moxley said. And until that changes, Trans Day of Remembrance will continue to be necessary to restore humanity to the lives of those who have been taken. In that vein, expanding the scope of TDOR makes sense to her.

Because the state’s laws threaten criminal penalties for abortion and helping someone to access abortion, doctors and sexual and domestic violence program advocates alike are under an acute pressure that has left even non-clinical program workers in social support network programs afraid to help survivors, especially if their work could be construed as having connected pregnant survivors of violence to abortion services, Miller said.

Across the country, some 2 million Native Americans live in the 20 states with laws on the books banning abortion at 18 weeks of pregnancy or earlier, according to a News21 analysis.

An over-the-counter birth control pill will be available to Americans for the first time early next year — but it’s not yet clear what it will cost or if insurance will cover it.

If the bill becomes law, it’s unclear how its directives would be carried out, and legal experts say its provisions would be easily challenged in court. But the immediate effect would be to prevent transgender and gender-nonconforming people from being protected by anti-discrimination laws, increase hostility and scrutiny of individual gender expression, and potentially cost the state billions in federal funds.