Friends of transgender woman turn their grief into a gift with scholarship fund

When LaliMohamed thinks of his friend SumayaDalmar, he often recalls the last New Years Eve they spent together, sittingaround with friends, laughingly making resolutions.

Dalmar's was simple.

"I'm going to meet a guy and buy a house and move to suburbia,"Mohamed recalled is friend saying. "We all laughed."

To some, it would have otherwise been mundane. But forDalmar, a black, Muslim, transgender woman, it was a dream that would ultimatelyremain unfulfilled.

In February of 2015, Dalmar was found dead at the age of 26in a home in Toronto's DanforthVillage. Three years later, the details of her death remain mired in the shadows.

That obscurity, for those who knew her, bears stark contrast to Dalmar's bold personality.

"She lived her life in a very public way and anybody who encountered her was immediately moved by her insistence to be exactly who she wanted to be," Mohamed said of Dalmar.

"I think people are pushed into closets people, are pushed to the margins but Sumaya refused that, she refused to be beholden to other people's ideas," he added.

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That fearlessness is something Mohamed and a group of Dalmar's friends hope to immortalize with a scholarship to provide aid to transgender students of colour to pursue their educational goals.

It's a cause he says she would have cared deeply about.

Before her death, Dalmar was about to begin working with the education department at the 519, Canada's largest LGBTQ community centre, Mohamed said.

Dalmar faced a combination of transphobia, Islamophobia and anti-black racism, heexplained. She moved to Vancouver, fleeing Somalia's civil war with her family when she was three years old. She eventually came to Toronto to begin her transition, he said.

But they've since lost hope in getting closure.

There was no evidence to indicate the death was suspicious," Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray told CBC Toronto, adding that police from 55 Division conducted a "thorough investigation."

Toxicology tests were done and returned to investigators, but police have never released a cause of death "to protect the privacy of the victim."

It's a refrain all too familiar for Mohamed, who felt some of the same frustrations come up in the community this past summer with the death of another transgender woman, Alloura Wells, whose funeral is set to take place Tuesday.

'There was this indifference'

"There was this indifference like they just didn't care about black, trans woman," Mohamed said. "For several months I would call the Toronto Police every week and they would just deflect my questions."

Wells was a transgender woman who went missing from the Church and Wellesley area last July.

A month later, residents stumbled upon the body of a transgender woman lying on the ground near a tent in Rosedale Ravine Lands Park, an area Wells's friends say she frequented. But the body wasn't identified as Wells until November when she was reported missing.

Wells' father, Michael, has previously said he felt his oldest daughter's disappearance wasn't taken seriously by officers.

Ryerson University's Alan Sears, one of the professors responsible for administering the award in Dalmar's case says the idea was to "benefit individual trans students of colour, and focus attention on the contributions of racialized trans communities."

The hope, says Mohammed, is that the example that Dalmar set through the life she lived will inspire other who share the struggles she did to realize their own dreams.

"She modelled to other women, particularly other trans women, what was possible," said Mohamed, "in a world that would rather disappear and erase trans women."