Seymour Flops
Diamond Member
A young transgender bus driver thought her CTA job was the answer
But Ava Hudson, 27, ended her life a year ago at a Blue Line L station in her CTA uniform.
A young transgender bus driver thought her CTA job was the answer
But Ava Hudson, 27, ended her life a year ago at a Blue Line L station in her CTA uniform.
www.wbez.org
The day Ava Michal Hudson got her new Chicago Transit Authority work ID in January 2024, she showed it right off.
In a selfie to her friend, she’s standing outside the Ogilvie Transportation Center near CTA’s Downtown headquarters, her dark layered hair blowing off her face, sparkly studs in her ears, chipped fuschia polish on the fingers holding the badge. She smiles faintly in the selfie but wide in the ID picture.
“CTA Employee Ava Hudson Bus Operator,” the badge reads.
Ava, a trans woman, eagerly joined the short-staffed CTA to get the stability, benefits and hiring bonus that would pay for her independence and ongoing transition after years of unemployment and scraping by with gig work.
Why would he kill himself? He's getting "gender affirming" care with great insurance and high pay. I thought the transgender suicides were caused by kids not getting treatment due to evil parents?
But in her seven months driving North Side bus routes, she found an environment that was not inclusive or supportive even as the CTA specifically includes gender identity in its anti-discrimination policy, the Chicago Sun-Times found after reviewing her hundred pages of records and interviewing family and friends. Supervisors and colleagues regularly misgendered her, including on work documents. A boxy, mannish uniform put her ill at ease and confused riders into calling her “sir.” She knew no other trans co-workers. And it’s not clear she had help from her union.
She felt “uncomfortable,” her dad said, at the job she desperately needed during a vulnerable time in her life — in the life of anyone in the early stages of transitioning.
Dude kills himself because the uniform for his job was mannish and people could tell he was male? People could have told he was male, if he wore a cocktail dress. Therapy to help him accept himself as he was would very likely have saved his life. Clearly, pretending that he was what his delusion told him and altering his body did not.
When are we going to say the true part out loud: People with gender dsyphoria are by definition self-loathing and confused, and act out by hurting themselves, or seeking to have others harm them.
Until we do, this particular mental health problem will never improve.
