We were born out of the necessity to create and promote inclusiveness for the transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) community in Orange County (OC) in California. During the global COVID-19 pandemic which exacerbated the challenges and needs of the TGNC community, Alianza Translatinx was founded by four transgender Latinx women: Khloe Rios-Wyatt, Cinthya Espinosa, Rachel Pozos, and Leslie Jimenez. Our leadership, which is representative of the people we serve, worked voluntarily during the first two years to help improve the quality of life for transgender and gender- nonconforming people of color in OC.

Through education, community empowerment, and social justice Alianza Translatinx advocates to uplift the TGNC community members to ensure and foster community inclusion and unity. ATL began by assisting the houseless TGNC community in Santa Ana through distributing hot plates of food on a weekly basis during the highest peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Even before COVID-19 however, the TGNC community in OC was already in a state of crisis and with the arrival of the pandemic Alianza Translatinx began to focus on areas that needed urgent attention, such as: access to comprehensive, culturally, and linguistically competent sexual health education and HIV prevention information as well as the provision of other basic services. Within the first two months of being established Alianza Translatinx began to curate services and programs that respond and pivot to community needs and which provide an array of services to TGNC people of color including health education, linkage to care, gender marker and name change supporting services, and referrals to medical services.