A state of emergency is not just a body count. When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declared a trans femicide state of emergency, critics said the numbers were too small to justify it. But that argument misunderstands what emergency declarations are for. Davonta Curtis was 31, murdered in her sleep. Her death is not a statistic to be weighed against others. It is a life, and it sits within a documented pattern of targeted violence.

Her name was Davonta Curtis

She was 31 years old. She was asleep when her boyfriend beat her to death with a hammer. He is now facing first-degree murder charges. That is where I want to start, not with the mayor's X post, not with the derisive comments racking up underneath it, not with the New York Post's arithmetic. With her.

Davonta Curtis was a trans woman living in Chicago. She was killed by someone she trusted, in a place where she should have been safe. The Human Rights Campaign found that 42% of trans murder victims nationally in 2024 were killed by a romantic partner, friend, or family member. Trans women are not being murdered by strangers in dark alleys. They are being murdered by people close to them, in private, in conditions shaped by stigma and shame and the pressure that so often forces trans women to conduct their relationships in secrecy. That is not a niche political concern. That is a pattern.

What a state of emergency actually means

Critics lined up to mock the language. One commenter asked who was paying the mayor to say "fantastical nonsense." Another suggested he must be drunk. The New York Post ran the numbers: 198 homicides in Chicago so far this year, one of them a trans woman. Therefore, they implied, the emergency is imaginary.

This is a deliberate misreading of what an emergency declaration does. It does not claim that trans women are being killed at higher rates than other groups. It names a specific form of targeted violence, killing motivated by transphobia and misogyny combined, and commits city resources to understanding and responding to it. Chicago recorded 14 trans killings between 2016 and 2024. That is not zero. That is a pattern spread across less than a decade in one city, and it almost certainly undercounts, because trans victims are frequently misgendered by police and in death records, which means some of those 198 other homicides this year may include trans people we will never identify as such.

The question "why don't you declare an emergency for all homicide victims?" is not the gotcha it sounds like. You can do both. Recognising that trans women face a specific, targeted form of violence does not take resources away from addressing gang violence. It adds specificity to the response. It asks: what is different about these killings? What does the climate around trans lives contribute to them? And what does the city owe the people it has failed?

The mockery is part of the climate

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The thousands of derisive comments on the mayor's post, the framing of trans femicide as "not a thing," the suggestion that naming this violence is itself a kind of absurdity: that is not a neutral response to a political decision. That is the ambient hostility that trans women in Chicago, and everywhere else, are living inside every day.

When a trans woman has to hide her relationship because her partner is ashamed of her, that shame is fed by exactly this kind of cultural contempt. When she is killed by that partner, the violence does not come from nowhere. It comes from a world in which her life has been loudly, publicly declared to be a political overcorrection, a joke, a distraction. The people writing "that's not a thing" on the mayor's post are not separate from the conditions that got Davonta Curtis killed. They are part of the atmosphere.

I am not suggesting that any individual commenter caused her death. I am saying that hostile public discourse has consequences for the safety of vulnerable people, and that a city choosing to name that hostility and respond to it is doing something more useful than the critics give it credit for.

What this declaration actually does

Mayor Johnson wrote that his administration has, since the original 2024 declaration, strengthened the city's capacity to support LGBTQ+ Chicagoans, and that the framework centres the voices and lived experiences of trans Chicagoans. That is not nothing. Support services, data collection, community engagement, a formal acknowledgement from a city government that trans women's lives matter and that their specific vulnerabilities deserve a specific response: these things change the texture of what it feels like to exist in a city as a trans woman.

They do not fix everything. A declaration of emergency cannot bring Davonta Curtis back, cannot undo the conditions that made her relationship dangerous, cannot rewrite the culture that shames trans women and the people who love them. But it says: we see you. We are counting you. We are not going to let your death disappear into a general homicide statistic.

That matters. I wish more cities were willing to say it.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate. She is the founder of GenderGP and writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.