Tracy has found a different lifeboat, the TransLife Center of Chicago House, a social service agency on the city’s North Side. The center provides legal, medical and housing assistance for transgender and gender nonconforming people. Josie Paul, a white transgender woman and the director of the center, says, “A number of individuals come in for service, who have been going back and forth” between male and female. They are transitioning, “but they put that on hold because they experience so much harassment, the threat of violence and death.”

“They’re frightened to present authentically,” Paul says. “Almost as many trans women have committed suicide this year as have been murdered.”

A Father’s Tale

On a blustery spring day, Tracy, who moved last August into the center, and center staff member, Irish, sat in the living room, discussing their experiences with violence as transgender women of color.

Irish joined the staff two years ago when the center, which houses up to nine people, first opened its doors. Like Tracy, she is a black transgender woman. Unlike Tracy, she has never been beaten up or raped or compelled to sell her body in order to survive. “But I’ve known people who’ve been robbed, killed, beat up because of who they are,” she says.

Until Irish was 30, she lived as a gay man. “For years I had been miserable,” she says. “I used to always live my life vicariously through my trans friends. They were happy. They got to really be themselves. And here I was in my teens and 20s being a gay boy but miserable inside. My family accepted me as being gay, but when you go and try to change your gender, it’s a totally different thing.”

But for Irish becoming who she was inside and out was an issue of life or death.

“I was going to commit suicide,” she says.

Then she became Irish.

“I’ve lost friends,” she says. “I’ve lost relatives. I’ve lost so much. But I’ve gained so much more. I became happy. I gained a sense of who I really was. The only regret I have in this lifetime now is not doing this way earlier.”

Her father did not abandon her. He was always supportive and loving to the end of his life in 2012. “A lot of people don’t have that,” Irish says. “A lot of people don’t have parents that actually support them.”

One day near the beginning of her transition five years ago, Irish asked her father over to her place to watch a documentary on transgender Americans. She wanted him to know that being transgender was “not just playing dress up” or “a fad” or “something you do today and then you’re done with it tomorrow.”

They watched the film together, sitting side-by-side on her bed. Afterwards Irish’s father was emotional, near tears. He cleared his throat and said he had something to tell her, something he had never told anyone before, something shameful, something that he never wanted to happen to his new daughter.

He told her that when he was a young man, a teenager, back in the 1970s, he and some buddies went to a nightclub on Chicago’s North Side. There he met a gorgeous woman and they danced the night away. Towards the end of the evening, dancing slow and close, he reached under the woman’s skirt and “discovered she had a penis.”

Irish’s dad and his friends rained blows down on the woman. “He told me they had attacked her so bad,” Irish says.

Telling his daughter what he had done to someone else’s daughter, Irish’s dad began to cry. “He felt remorse for what he had done,” she says. “To be in his trans daughter’s room, sitting on her bed, watching her transform, basically right in front of his eyes, I believe that was his moment of making amends, or at least trying to ask for forgiveness from that person through me.”

He told Irish he didn’t want anyone to do to her what he had done to that transgender woman.

“It brought me closer to him,” she says. “I had developed a newfound respect for him. Not for the situation that happened when he was younger, but him owning up to it. Him having a human heart, saying, you know, ‘I messed up, especially now, knowing that you are a trans woman yourself.’”

It’s Her Life

When Tracy was in her 20s, trying to save up enough money to have gender reassignment surgery — so her inner and outer self could finally match — a stalker shot her in the back and in the legs on a Chicago street.

She was working in the porn industry. She couldn’t find a job in the straight world. She’d ace an interview, but when the HR department saw that the name and gender on her ID didn’t match the well-dressed woman filling out the application, suddenly the job was no longer available.

The porn industry was safer than working the Stroll. “I used to get raped by clients all the time,” she says. “To me that was paying taxes. You literally had to become desensitized to this shit. I would get raped. Clean myself up and stand on the same corner where I got picked up by the guy that raped me.”

She believes the man who shot her was a fan of her porn work. She says he mumbled something about trying to contact her and being brushed off. Now he was going to teach her a lesson. He chased her down the street and shot her.

As she lay bleeding on the sidewalk, he stood over her, ready to finish what he started. He pulled the trigger twice more. Each time, the gun jammed and the stalker ran away.

This near-death experience confirmed something Tracy had always known in her heart despite what society tried to tell her at every turn.

God loves transgender people, too.

“That’s the only thing that saved me,” she says. “God.”

Yet being shot wasn’t the most traumatic experience she had that night.

The police quickly arrived. Paramedics were right behind them. The paramedics began cutting off her pants to treat her leg wounds. They abruptly stopped when they discovered she was a pre-op transgender woman.

“We’re going to take care of you ma’am’ turned into nobody gives a fuck now,” she says. “I started making my peace with God. I thought they were going to leave me there to bleed to death.”

They didn’t leave her, and Tracy woke up in the hospital, relieved, angry and heartbroken — and not for the first or last time.

“Everybody who is supposed to protect me, to help me, those are the people who have done the most harm to me,” she says. “It’s like, who can you trust?”

Tracy never did have the reassignment surgery. She decided it wasn’t worth it. “I’ve never really had any issues with my body,” she says. “I’ve known a lot of girls who had gender reassignment who killed themselves afterwards. They really thought life was going to be completely different. Nothing changed. That’s a whole lot of money to invest to still have the same life.”

One thing Tracy has always had in her life is complete support from her family. As soon as she could walk and talk, Tracy says her mother knew she was different. When Tracy was a teenager, her mother pulled her aside and said she’d rather have a live daughter than a dead son, so at high school, “I should act one way and when I got home I could be myself,” Tracy says.

As Tracy was telling her story, her mother called. Mom was outside, ready to take her daughter to a doctor’s appointment.

Tracy tries to be that kind of Mama to her transgender daughters and sisters. She tells them that life for transgender people is better than it was when she was a young woman. There are transgender people like Irish working in social service agencies, starring in cable dramas and appearing on talk shows, not as freaks, but as proud men and women. Sure, there’s still a long way to go, “but we’re going.”

In the meantime, she tells them, “There’s a teenager out there somewhere who you will need to be the mentor to. She’s trying to figure herself out and she’s coming to you to be there and have your shit together as best you can. You know I don’t have all my stuff on the ball but I give y’all what I can.”

Tracy says it is during these conversations that she realizes that all the pain she has gone through “makes sense, so I can be able to tell them and relate.”

“It gives purpose to my pain,” she says. “My life has not been a picnic, but it’s been mine. Not to have to live one day pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, priceless. I tell the young girls I’d do it all over again. I’d take all the pain and another bullet again to be my authentic self — the woman God made.”

This story was published in the Summer 2015 issue of the Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s award-winning magazine. The quarterly publication provides comprehensive updates to law enforcement agencies, the media and the general public. It is the nation’s preeminent periodical monitoring the radical right in the U.S.

To read more from the Summer 2015 issue, click here.