Imagine not being welcome in your own home, being threatened and even beaten because of how you identify. It’s what most transgender children in India experience.

70% of them end up on the streets before the age of 15, and without money or education often have to rely on sex work. As a result, transgender people have a 34 times greater risk of acquiring HIV than other adults.

UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV, is committed to breaking down the gender stigma and discrimination that are creating this heartbreaking situation.

What’s needed is a shift in perception of transgender people within Indian society, especially among parents of young children. Their common belief is that gender is a choice, while in reality children naturally identify with gender as early as 2 years old and promptly start hiding their true identity from disapproving eyes of family and caregivers.

Children often love to collect their most precious possessions in a little treasure box. These objects reveal what they like, who they are and what they dream of. Trans children are no different. But for them, their box becomes a place to hide their identity, filled with items that don’t fit the gender norm society expects them to conform to.

Based on the stories of dozens of transgender men and women, we carefully and respectfully recreated their childhood treasure boxes and turned them into tools to open the conversation around children’s gender identity.

On social media, influential Indian personalities unboxed these childhood treasure boxes for the world to see, urging everyone to provide their children with a loving home where they can develop into the person they really are. In school communities, the boxes are being used as educational tools to help parents, teachers and children openly discuss gender identity.

We talked to dozens of transgender adults about their childhood treasure box. All of them confirmed that it was either destroyed by their parents or left behind when they had to leave home.

So, we listened to their emotional stories and learned exactly what their childhood box looked like, which belongings it contained and what those belongings truly meant to them.

Based on that input, we carefully and respectfully recreated the boxes and their contents, as accurately as possible. We spent countless hours researching and sourcing hundreds of objects from second-hand websites, thrift stores and flea markets all over India.

Bangles, lipstick, a toy car and even the boxes themselves, we paid attention to the size, shape and material of every single piece and then retouched our closest matches to make them look even more authentic.

Finally, a personal message was enclosed, giving each box a heart and a soul.