TOLEDO, Ohio — If you happened to walk into Handmade Toledo on Adams Street in central Toledo Wednesday evening, you may have seen 36 chairs.
Each one represented a life lost.
"The losses we're counting for are for people who were murdered out of hate," said Nikki Orlewski, a committee member of Equality Toledo.
Since last year, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation reports that 36 transgender and gender-expansive people have been murdered in the U.S.
And on Wednesday, members of Equality Toledo honored these victims with one rose at a time.
"It's a hard day," Orlewski said. "It's one of the things that kept me from transitioning for a long time. It was the fear of being attacked by someone."
Transgender Day of Remembrance is annually recognized on Nov. 20 and originated in 1999 after Rita Hester, a trans woman, was killed in Massachusetts. It marks the end of a week each year dedicated to raising knowledge and awareness about transgender people and issues.
"I'm glad our community can come together to support each other, but the reason we have to is wrong," Orlewski said.
Concern about the future and safety of the transgender community still lingers.
Toledo City Council member Nick Komives says he's concerned about Ohio House Bill 183. If Gov. Mike DeWine signs it into law, it would require transgender students at schools to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their sex assigned at birth.
"I think it's really unfortunate the rhetoric we're hearing so frequently, that trans people are a threat or that they are bad in society," Komives said. "It's just the literal opposite of what's true."
But in the face of adversity, Equality Toledo's Devon-Jae Adonis Morales says the antidote to hate is love:
"I'm not a monster, we're not monsters here, OK? We love, we love, we love."