About 30 community members gathered Sept. 12 at the corner of North Kenton Avenue and West Monroe Street in Garfield Park to remember a trans woman, T.T., believed to be about 26- or 27-years-old, who was murdered the evening of Sept. 11. Her throat had been cut and a knife was found nearby.
At the site where T.T.'s body was discovered on the 4500 block of Monroe Street, mourners hung balloons, lit candles and hung a sign on which they wrote messages of love and respect.
T.T. is the 20th trans person to be killed in the United States in 2016. At the vigil, Chicago trans activist Reyna Ortiz read the names of all 20 individuals, and said that a transgender person was murdered on average about every 29 hours around the world.
"T.T. was family to us," said her friend Trinity, who added that the area was a dangerous one for trans women, an opinion stated by several other individuals attending the rally.
"If they walk through here, people throw stuff at them or pour water on them," said Gladys Carter, another friend. "It happens frequently, because they are transgender."
Carter met T.T., who was a hairdresser, about six months ago. "She came to my house and played with my kids," Carter said. "… Last night I looked on Facebook and it said that someone had their neck slashed, and they said it was [T.T.]"
Carter said that T.T. spoke of her family being on the South Side and that she seemed to get along with them. But she also said that T.T. mentioned being in an altercation with another trans person the previous Friday.
But T.T. did not go to the police. Jaliyah Armstrong, who organized the vigil, said, "I guess she didn't feel like it was too much of a threat, another trans woman, one of her 'sisters.'"
Armstrong knew T.T. for about seven years, she said, adding that she was not confident the police would aggressively pursue the matter. The area was not far from the location of the 2012 killings of Paige Clay and Tiffany Gooden, both of them transgender women, which remain unsolved.
"They always say, 'Black lives matter,'" said Armstrong. "Trans lives matter too. It seems like nothing is being done when one of my trans sisters gets killed, right across the street."
T.T. was misgendered in both police reports and media accounts of the killing; she was reported as being a man, not a transgender woman. But Carter said T.T. identified as a woman, and friends said that she did not use her name given at birth.
"She would want to be want to be called a 'girl,'" said Carter. "That's what we always called her."
Related coverage at the link: www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Transgender-woman-found-slain-on-Chicagos-West-Side/56450.html .
