In May, more than a month into India’s COVID-19 lockdown, Aijaz Bund started an online fundraising campaign with the help of some friends. The aim was to collect food and money to aid Kashmir’s minuscule transgender population.
Bund managed to raise 200,000 rupees ($2,600). Although not nearly enough to help all the transgender people of the region, it was a start. “The entire Kashmir has been in a state of lockdown for over a year now. It has been particularly hard on the region’s estimated 4,000 transgender people,” Bund told me in August, “who are mostly shunned by their families and rely on small gigs like performing at marriages to make a living.”
