The Indigo Wills Project is a Washington-based organization that helps Trans people create wills and assists with the name change process, free of charge. The SGN had the opportunity to talk with the project’s founder, Cirilla Anderson, about what led her to found it and about the process behind creating a will.

The project is named in honor of Indigo Greene, a Transgender woman whose untimely passing led to a legal battle over her burial. Anderson explained that she was a close friend of Greene, and so people in their friend group had reached out to her for legal advice. Despite Greene leaving behind a note expressing her wish to have her remains handled by her fiancée, Mia Larotonda, it did not count as a notarized will. Because Greene was unmarried and didn’t have a legally binding will, she was declared to have died intestate and was returned to her estranged, transphobic parents in Alabama.

An unfortunate reality for many Trans people is that we face increased mortality rates from mental health and hate crimes, especially at an age when most people aren’t as concerned with having a will. For this reason, Anderson recognized the need for an organization to advance will creation in the Trans community and raise awareness about the importance of such a testament.

The idea of setting up a document detailing what should happen to someone after they die can be quite morbid, and many people don’t want to talk about their death and the impact it would have. This can serve as a barrier to the group’s mission.

“What I try to tell people is to think of your friends, think of people who are going to have to — I don’t want to say pick up the pieces but deal with your passing,” Anderson explained. “And we’ve seen with Mia and with all of Indigo’s partners the incredible strain that that puts on people, and I know no one wants to think about dying, [but] the truth is we are all going to die, and it is something that needs to be on our mind.”