Chalk has never been so resilient.

Before the ribbon was even cut, the newly renamed Barbara Hall Park near Church and Wellesley was the centre of controversy last month when city staff washed away a chalk memorial to fallen members of the trans community.

“I was furious,” says 30-year-old Toronto trans activist Christin Milloy. “The city came along and literally erased the deaths of trans people.”

But hours later, chalk in hand, the community flooded back to the empty brick wall, then just a faint outline of the original memorial, and recreated the colourful mural. Lit from above by rainbow lights, the memorial — still going strong more than three weeks later — features a large white transgender symbol surrounded by the names of friends murdered or lost to suicide.

This time, there are new words scrawled at the bottom in bold capital letters: “YOU WILL NOT ERASE US.”

“They can take it down a million times, we’ll put it up a million and one times,” says Milloy.

Now, the community has been promised a permanent memorial by Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, Milloy adds.

The erasure was an honest mistake by city staff just doing their job, says Wong-Tam, who apologized to members of the community at the unveiling of the park’s new name on July 16.

“I don’t think that there would have been a rush to remove it had the city staff recognized what it was,” says Wong-Tam. “I would say that there would be a large number of LGBT community members — minus the T — who probably would not recognize the trans symbol if they saw it.”

City staff washed the memorial away in cleaning preparations for the ceremony announcing the park’s unveiling as Barbara Hall Park, renamed from Cawthra Square Park in honour of the former mayor and current Ontario Human Rights Commissioner.

Barbara Hall, who was moved to recognize a name on the grassroots memorial herself, says the incident was “a really unfortunate blip in what recently has been a very positive pathway of empowerment and growing awareness of (trans) issues,” citing the recent work by the rights commission to include “gender identity” and “gender expression” as grounds for discrimination.

“I believe that trans people are some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our community,” says Hall, who hopes the trans empowerment so many have worked for can continue. “I think the memorial is a part of that empowerment.”

As a city councillor, Wong-Tam says she can’t “encourage people to write on public assets,” but a chalk memorial — weather permitting — will do until a more permanent fixture is decided on. “This is not a one-day resolution,” she says, noting that no official plans for a memorial exist, and that no one had asked for one until that week.

“But if the community has taught me anything, there seems to be a real passion and desire to give voice to the voiceless, and to ensure visibility to those who are living outside of the purview right now.”

Indeed, suicide and murder rates are disproportionately greater for transgender people, despite being a group that make up a small portion of the broader queer community.

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“In addition to facing mass discrimination in society, our lives are in danger,” says Milloy, a trans woman and activist who once ran for provincial office in 2011, the first out trans person to do so. “We are killed, and something needs to be done. That’s why a memorial is absolutely necessary. It also gives us a place to go to reflect on these issues, and to remember those that we’ve lost.”

Milloy says the memorial debacle is a kind of microcosm for what trans people are dealing with in the city and the country. The community has no support, she says, apologizing for sounding “militant” — but it’s the truth: “We have to do things for ourselves, and then when we do, it gets torn down. We get erased and marginalized again and again.”