The Portland police have identified the victim of a downtown homicide as a transgender woman.
According to Portland Police Bureau (PPB) report, the 28-year-old woman named Gigi was found with a fatal gunshot wound late Monday evening on SW 2nd between SW Ash and SW Ankeny. Officers who arrived at the scene arrested one suspect, 33-year-old Sophia Grace Adler, who has since been booked in the Multnomah County Jail on murder charges.
It wasn’t until 5:30 pm that the police identified Gigi as a trans woman. According to PPB, Gigi is from Boise, Idaho. It’s unknown how long she had been visiting—or living in—Portland.
Q Center Executive Director Oscar Guerra-Vera said he’s aware of Gigi’s death and is planning a community response.
Transgender women are the most common victims of fatal anti-transgender violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Since 2013, HRC has recorded at least 102 murders of transgender people in the United States—and 88 percent of the victims were transgender women (87 percent were people of color).
Gigi’s death marks the eleventh transgender homicide in the US in 2018, based on HRC data.
Editor’s Note: After feedback from LGBTQ advocates about how to respectfully share Gigi’s story, we’ve removed PPB’s reference to the name Gigi was assigned at birth.
Wow, both altering your reporting and deleting comments over the factual naming issue. Pretty totalitarian and shitty here, Alex. I used to laugh at the right-wing whining about the “intolerant left,” and yet here you are confirming the stereotype on an issue that is still relatively new and does not at all have any kind of consensus, even among liberals and feminists generally.