There has never been any specific recognition of the Trans Community on stage at the Great Lakes Bay Region AIDS Walk, and there has never been a Trans member on the AIDS Walk committee. According to the organizers, they represent the entire LGBT community, but if the Trans community wants to be included at the table where we would have a voice in the HIV/AIDS discussion, we must prove that we are capable of raising significant amounts of money. When you consider the exponentially higher rates of poverty and unemployment in the Trans community, we have mountains to climb to meet their standards for inclusion. However, until we meet those standards, we will be excluded from the table and we will never be able to convince them that the health care needs of the Transgender community are not the same as the needs of the cis-gender LGB community. We must be at the table and this fundraising effort is the first step in proving to them that the HIV/AIDS crisis in our community is real and we belong in the discussion. Please support us. If you have any doubts, consider this from the Centers for Disease Control (April 2015): "According to the Centers for Disease Control (April 2015), as many as 73% of the transgender women who tested HIV-positive were unaware of their status. An analysis of 29 published studies found that 27.7% of transgender women tested positive for HIV infection, but only 11.8% of transgender women self-reported having HIV. In one study, Studies also indicate that black transgender women are more likely to become infected with HIV than non-black transgender women. "Higher percentages of newly identified HIV-positive test results were found among black/African American transgender women (56.3%) than among white (16.7%) or Latino (16.1%) transgender women; and self-reported HIV infection in studies made up of predominantly of black/African American transgender women (30.8%) was higher than positivity reported in studies comprising mainly white transgender women (6.1%)."