Ava Michal Hudson
Age 277 Aug 2024
Chicago, Illinois (USA)
Suicide
Ava died by suicide. She was a bus driver and had been repeatedly misgendered at work but had not been offered any support by her employer.
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.
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.
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.
One year ago, on the morning of Aug. 7, 2024, Ava was seen in her blue CTA shirt and black pants running down the platform at the Austin L station near her home in Oak Park. Instead of boarding the Blue Line train toward her shift that day, Ava died by suicide. She was 27.
Police found no note. Her stunned friends and family have been left to wonder.
https://www.wbez.org/lgbtq/2025/08/08/cta-transgender-bus-driver-suicide-ava-hudson-blue-line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6MFFGvJpHM
