A caution for readers: This story contains material that discusses suicide.

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.

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 coworkers. And it’s not clear she had help from her union.

She felt “uncomfortable,” her dad says, 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, she jumped in front of it.

Ava died by suicide. She was 27.

Police found no note. Her stunned friends and family have been left to wonder.

“We still have a lot of questions about it,” says Steve Hudson, the uncle Ava was living with during the COVID-19 lockdown, a rough time for her mentally and when she began openly transitioning.

When the CTA reviewed her death by one of its trains as part of its protocol, managers focused on the driver’s actions and on his safety record as a veteran train operator. That’s according to the seven pages transit officials released under Illinois’ public records law.

Nowhere did the agency document any efforts to question what may have led a relatively new bus operator, and a transgender one at that, to end her life on CTA property — in full uniform ahead of her scheduled shift as a bus driver.

When asked about that, CTA spokesman Manny Gonzales referred the Sun-Times to police in Oak Park, where the Austin L station sits. Gonzales would not make anyone at the CTA available for an interview and refused to answer nearly all questions.

An uncomfortable fit

Ava’s friends and family say the nature of her public-facing job seemed to be wearing her down, even as it provided her the financial security she had long needed. After graduating from college in 2020 in west suburban Wheaton, her hometown, she had a spate of frustrating and lean years — cosmetology school, and DoorDash-type jobs where she still relied on relatives.

She wanted to live with peers, and transitioning — particularly hair removal — proved expensive. In a 2022 court case to legally change her name, Ava detailed that she spent $875 a month on “transition related costs” — more than her rent — plus hundreds more for medical expenses and counseling.

Entering CTA training in November 2023 “boosted her spirits quite a bit,” says her father, Michael Hudson. “It was great for her to have a job and to be earning some money.”

He says Ava said little about her job that paid about $61,000 a year, but she made this clear: “She wasn’t sure how to present at work. I know she was uncomfortable and not able to be herself. She had talked about looking for a different job within the CTA.”

Records of Ava’s job problems first appeared in March 2024. That’s when a supervisor not only reprimanded her for violating a sick-time policy, but used “his” to describe her in this report and a later one.

A different supervisor also referred to Hudson as “he” and “him” in May in a summary about customers on Ava’s bus who didn’t pay.

“She had problems with misgendering from both supervisors and coworkers,” says Madison McClendon, a friend who welcomed Ava in her apartment’s guest room for five months, from November 2023, when Ava applied to the CTA, through March.

Even with the most feminine uniform pieces, including a little criss-cross necktie, customers still erroneously addressed her, McClendon says. It was hardly all ill-intended, but it grated on her. And Ava felt like she couldn’t speak up.

“When it comes to the CTA uniform you’re given, it’s very androgenizing. It’s hard to be yourself,” she says.

It’s not clear how many transgender and nonbinary employees work for the CTA. Ava didn’t know any.

The work woes ramped up in July. Ava was disciplined for calling out sick two hours before a scheduled bus run. The previous week she had clipped the front of another bus while making a left turn downtown. On July 31, one week before she died, she hit the mirror of a parked car along a North Side route. Both were minor accidents, but they came with reprimands.

Around the same time, Ava suddenly cropped her hair. But she told her friend she instantly regretted it.

“She did say part of the reason for this was she felt like in her work environment, it was just too much of a struggle to require people to gender her the way she wanted,” McClendon says. At home, she wore feminine clothes, padded out her body shape and painted her nails. “You could still see her joy was in taking steps to feminize.”

It appears Ava dealt with her bosses on her own. On her disciplinary forms, nobody signed on the line reserved for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241. Ava’s union steward wouldn’t talk without the consent of local president Keith Hill, who did not return multiple messages.

Ava never complained in writing, but two other transgender employees did. A fellow bus driver sued in 2022, alleging wrongful termination after he pushed for gender-affirming care on CTA health insurance. A federal judge dismissed his lawsuit against the agency and union; the driver has appealed. A CTA apprentice filed an internal complaint in 2023 after she was told to stop using the women’s restroom.

A path derailed

Like many transgender people, Ava struggled with mental health issues as she was figuring out who she wanted the world to see.

Suicide risk is high among this group. Some 48% of transgender or nonbinary young people ages 13 to 24 in Illinois seriously considered suicide last year, according to a survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that aims to end suicide among LGBTQ+ young people.

But Ava’s loved ones believed she was well along the path she shared a few years earlier when she asked them to use her new name.

By July 2024 she had scored a $2,600 salary bump. She booked a longed-for electrolysis session.

Later in August, she planned to move to Chicago. Through mutual friends, she found a place much closer to her bus depot in what housemate Andrea Craft touts as a “trans-centric household” with a garden and fruit trees — a place to bolster a sense of self.

The morning of her death, she was worried about being late to her shift later that day because she’d had some tardy arrivals, which can lead to discipline. She had stayed with her parents in the suburbs and wanted to drive home early, her dad says. He figured she would head straight to work.

She had been with her family since the weekend to celebrate her brother’s wedding. A portrait captures them together, elegant and smiling: Ava in a long black dress with giant green flowers, with her parents, the bride and groom, her two sisters.

She seemed to be in a good place, says Steve Hudson, the uncle who had taken her into his Chicago home, prompting him to tell her in person:

“I’m really proud of what you’ve been able to do,” he told Ava, “to get this job and get your life together.”

Contributing: Violet Miller