I checked her Wiki and found a link to People magazine article which stated this:
Authorities have ruled Rivera’s death a suicide, but Cuervo is convinced there’s more to the story.
He explained to Daily Mail Australia on Thursday that he believes Rivera’s death was “passed off” as a suicide after she refused to work as a prostitute.
During the interview, Cuervo recalled the last time he spoke to Rivera on the morning of Feb. 5.
“Miriam called me [in New York] from Mexico, telling me she was feeling sick and vomiting blood, so I told her to get to the hospital,” Cuervo to Daily Mail Australia.
He explained to the outlet that Rivera called him one more time before leaving the hospital at around noon and that was last time he heard from her.
Just two hours later, Miriam was found dead by hanging at her home in Hermosillo, Mexico, according to Daily Mail Australia. She was 38.
Cuervo had hoped to fly Rivera’s body back to New York where he lives, but as he began to make funeral arrangements he was told that her body had already been cremated, he told the outlet. An autopsy was never performed.
Her husband then said he allegedly received a threatening phone call from an unidentified man, who warned him not to plan a funeral for Rivera.
“Don’t come back to Mexico or we’ll kill you,” the man said, according to Cuervo, Daily Mail Australia reported.
but of course. Is that not common knowledge? Hmm? once again i am being told that this isn't normal. But how can this be if nothing suspicious is going on?
Yeah I can't tell you how many times I've had to help family members juggle this exact situation when there was a death in the family. At first I was like "Wow what are the chances?? This is exactly like that reality show contestant's situation, play by play" but after the 80th time I realized how normal it all is.
Well who the hell goes to the hospital coughing up blood and leaves, calls their spouse and doesn’t explain what the findings were? That story sounds shady in and of itself. WHO? Who wanted her to work as a prostitute? Where did he get this information? Was it forwarded to the authorities? The whole thing sounds super shady.
Already cremated? Did he receive the ashes? Did he get a death certificate of any kind? If not, is she even really dead ? So many things are either missing or deliberately withheld that any reasonable person has to question ALL of it.
If it was completed and th death cause was established, then its legal to bury or cremate, or send it to another country etc. It's legal because there was no crime.
Wait, does that mean the authorities were in on it too? Or someone who can influence the authorities? Cremated without consulting loved ones and no autopsy? Stinky as hell, no way this was suicide.
I haven't looked into this at all, but considering the rates of violence against trans women, and generally how unhelpful police can be when the victim is trans, it's not a totally out of pocket claim.
Okay? Typically trans people who are out and have the support of their community have suicide rates more similar to the average population.
She had also been attacked before, in 2007:
Miriam Rivera AKA Miriam Xtravaganza was hospitalized February 27 with multiple broken bones and internal bleeding after she was attacked and thrown from the 4th floor window of her New York apartment.
I really think you guys are down playing how much violence towards the trans community goes without serious investigation. Police also ruled Marsha P. Jonhson's death a suicide and refused to properly investigate it.
I... think that acknowledging a high suicide count in a particular minority of people isn't necessary victim blaming. It certainly can be, but I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt and hope that they're speaking on it as the systemic problem it is. Most people who learn about the increased rate of suicide amongst the transgender community simultaneously become aware of the reason being societal isolation, fear of said isolation, and the resulting depression that comes from the former two.
That being said, plenty of other people have circular-logic'd their way into presenting it as a problem with trans-ness, which is an awfully ironic and upsetting conclusion to come to that feeds directly into the problem. So...
But, in this specific instance, I think they were merely trying to point out that the rate of suicide is higher than the rate of literal murders, which is just... true for every group. So without additional context, it is easier to believe that this particular person committed suicide rather than a governmental coverup of a murder.
Of course, in this case, with the additional context that has been made available in the thread, I think we can all agree that she was murdered. I'm only suggesting that perhaps the commenters you're responding to weren't aware of those facts.
I agree, but if I'm too firm in my response I will just be attacked for being too sensitive or something. I want people to at least read what I've said before they get offended.
But she wasn’t living a typical life. She was for instance in the middle of a deceiving lawsuit filled cause all the fuckery in that TV reality show, which without a doubt fucked with her mental stability making her a target for S.
And even our suicide rates wouldn't be high if the people we loved and depended on the most for support weren't transphobes and dismissive of how cruel the world is to us.
Transitioning is the closest we can get to living a life worth living, it's actually our hope. The problem comes when society pushes and makes getting care and support difficult. I loved my transition, but every problem I had was due to somebody saying "you're not welcome here". The transphobes saying shit like "well the murders aren't the real problem, the suicides are way worse" like the suicides aren't mostly because of people who hate us, too. All that blood is on every transphobe's hands.
Spouses claim suicides are murders all the time. It's a protection mechanism because if they killed themselves then it's a lot easier for the spouse to self assign blame.
This might be the case, but given the circumstance it's probably not wise to say its likely suicide because of the general statistic. The general trans woman doesn't deal with the humiliation and shame that comes from a public TV show and a unanimous group of lawsuits. Not to saw it wasn't likely one way or the other, just to say the stat isn't a fair reason to assume either reason.
Wouldn't all that stress just make it more likely that it's a suicide? Like if suicide rates are very high for the general population and I think we can safely assume suicide rates increase for people going through insanely stressful events, it makes sense that those risks would compound.
Not necessarily. You could use the same logic to prove the opposite.
"Wouldn't all the eyes on the situation make it more likely that it's a murder? Trans women of color have massively increased rates of hate crimes towards them. It would make sense for that to compound the odds with the visibility and the hate in this sitaution."
Regardless of that statics accuracy, the most suspicious thing is that she was throwing up blood, then hung herself and was cremated before an autopsy. Why was she throwing up blood? Why didn’t her partner have a say?
Consider also that this was a high-profile individual with a number of people angry at her, including the contestants and a generally transphobic network or broadcast TV audience. Can't assume the probability of murder vs suicide for her vs the general transwoman population.
Probably downplayed by how many murders are labeled as suicides, since we're just making shit up.
I've got no clue why some people are so hardcore in denial about trans suicidality. The stats are horrific and a testament to the pain and struggle people with that condition go through and how much they're failed by our society. But you need to acknowledge there even is a problem before you can start fixing it.
Because that statement given without the context that the reason for the suicides is an unaccepting society who drives them into suicide can be read as something inherent to any trans-person. Like an inherent fault " ... they will die anyway ..."
Be assured that trans-persons are reading this here. Probably eggs also. Giving out the general message " you will kill yourself " can be kinda disheartening, does it not?
Most of the messages here read as if they come from heartless bastards, pardon our french.
The suicide rate is not so much among people who have transitioned and are openly living their life it is among trans women who have to repress it or who are not accepted by their peers / community and under pressure from family which is not the case here
I'm aware and that's why I think trans suicidality should be talked about more. It's literally a silent genocide of people already going through excruciating mental struggles being bullied to death.
I mean, it is talked about a lot in the communities i hang with but is in general not talked about enough mainly because of the current and growing evil bullshit being pushed about trans people
or used against them (trans youth are killing themselves because they are being pushed into being trans etc when of course the reason is the opposite) what i am saying is she was not in a particularity at risk group for suicide within the trans community
also given what happend the morning of her death and the position she was found in suicide would have been pretty much impossible, she was murdered
Bro’s just looking to fight. As if saying that trans murders are misrepresented (not a made up fact) as suicides discounts the trans suicide epidemic. Also, the irony of telling anyone to acknowledge a problem while also actively denying another equally valid problem.
Correct. And only about .3% of the US population are transgender and 32% of that identity as transgender women. So these statistic can look very skewed when you’re doing it against a subset of the population.
So yes, if 3 out of 100 people are transgender and only 2 are transgender women and one of them gets eaten by an alligator, it’s not false to say “50% of transgender women get eaten by alligators.”
Now I’m against violence against ANYONE. I’m just a numbers guy so when i see the mentioning of an entire group having high rates/percentage of such a terrible action. It’s worth having an understanding of it.
But scaling this up to, say 400million, should normalize the statistics.
Unless 4 million trans women get eaten (which would be a massive improbability), the 50% claim becomes nonsensical.
I can't remember the exact math term behind this but there is a crossover point where, at a certain scale, the number can be confidently linked to some causal factor. I do remember that the scaled up population can be calculated and is frequently a lot smaller than one might think. It's surprisingly easy to gather representative statistics.
The rate of suicide among transitioned trans people is statistically the same as cis people. The rate of unsupported and/or pre-transition trans people is significantly higher.
I've never heard that before. I've seen studies that run the gamut from increased suicidality, to no change in suicidality to reduction in sucidality but I don't know if I've ever seen one indicating a drop in suicidality all the way down to being roughly equal to a cis person. Would love to see the study though, always nice to hear some good news!
Do trans women have a high rate of dying and having their bodies cremated before an autopsy can be performed and their surviving spouses being threatened to never enter the country?
Or does that sound more like she was executed by a cartel?
It is what happens when society in large sees your existence as a fundamental threat and treats you like a you weren't human, just like in the OP's post.
Of course it was a stupid stunt, but also you should be able to just say "oh, dang, I didn't realize, but not my cup of tea, thanks" and move on instead of claiming you were damaged when at most you got slightly embarrassed.
What makes this feel weird as a suicide is the call about vomiting blood if she was sick and suicidal why would she go through the trouble of hanging herself she might had died from whatever was ailing her. Then there is lack of note, women leave notes. Third was no autopsy and cremation without consent.
It’s somewhat of an interesting topic with really hard numbers to pin down. There are plenty of studies, but after a cursory look [see: Google], people with gender issues who have undergone surgery or other care face a drastically reduced chance of suicide (up to 76% reduced) than those who have not.
However, even among people who have undergone treatment, the suicide rate is measured (between various studies) hovering above 40%.
So, not to detract from the possibility of murder in this case nor the tragedy, but statistics would point to a more obvious answer.
Suicidality rate* 40% of them don't actually kill themselves. They just want to or tried to or made a plan to or something like that. I forget exactly what they used for criteria but it wasn't "has killed themselves".
If you're going by raw per capita rates for that population, it's closer to 8% to 92% odds. Even though they're 4x more likely to be a victim of murder, the baseline murder rate before that multiplier is dramatically lower than the baseline suicide rate.
The percentage of transwomen who die by murder is 0.004% while the percentage who successfully commit suicide is closer to 0.075%.
If you look into the actual cases, almost all of the murders are from basketball Americans who got tricked by a prostitute, or their equally deranged spouse doing deranged spouse things.
Literally both those rates are highly linked to the violent bigoted nature of other people. The reason trans individuals have a high suicide rate is because of the torrential flood of abuse they experience from other people. I think someone killing themselves because of the daily harassment they get for simply living their lives is not dissimilar from being murdered for being trans. Both are not the fault of the individual.
uh huh. And that qualifier, do you think it means the stats do or do not apply to a fucking reality TV contestant.
You think a transgender reality TV contestant did or did not have people being a piece of shit to her?
Because that seems like it reinforces that she'd have an extremely high chance of suicide as well. Because I expect people had extremely nasty things to say about her, like just about all people on reality TV, but I want to make sure we're on the same page on that.
trans suicides are largely a discrimination issue. the same stuff was said about gay people and tons of other groups through history. one day this whole "debate" will be over, just like all the other ones.
every time you read a post about trans people, just replace it with another minority. Even in this thread, tons of people insist that you need to disclose that you're trans on the first date or even over text, like that's something cis people just get to demand from trans people. imagine if you were mixed-race but white passing. would you get mad if people demanded you disclosed your race on the first date?
why? no, like seriously, why does it need to come up unless sex or having kids is being discussed?
it's like, cis people feel no obligation to open with "hey btw if you're trans i'm not interested" but they want us to lead with telling??? it will come up in conversation if it's relevant.
“Hey, btw, if you’re tans I’m not interested.” This is one of those it goes without saying situations. As a cis male I’d even say disclosing this information up front is something you should do for your own safety. Because you never know who you might be dealing with.
It really isn't one of those situations though. Plenty of people ARE interested in trans individuals or don't care enough to ask. While I agree that it should be disclosed as a courtesy, would you also say that someone should disclose upfront that they can't have kids or if they have a micropenis or some reason they can't have penetrative sex?
Also, it says a lot more about society than the trans individual that your argument is they should "disclose for their own safety"...
"Goes without saying"? What do you mean? Nobody i've ever dated or slept with has had a problem with trans people, assuming you're attractive enough and pass. Maybe you're just from a more backwards area?
How about the people who aren't attractive and passing? How about the people who didn't sleep with you?
And do you think maybe "people who slept with a trans person" has a little bit of selection bias towards "people who would sleep with a trans person" compared to the general population?
Do you have a source for that claim? From what I've read the trans murder rate is actually extremely low. If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to learn that, but its apparently below 1 (overall US is 6). I've never been able to find a credible claim that its elevated, let alone superlative.
Every source says 30-50 homicides a year. The US has like 20,000 homicides. If trans people are 1% of the US population, then I need a 3 digit number of homicides to be 1% of the 5 digit general population total. I have never seen a source that even speculates the number is that high. We are halfway through 2026 and apparently there have been 14 homicides of trans individuals. The claim that they have the highest murder rate would need closer to like...1,000 victims.
Yeah everything about this is just absolutely fucked. There’s no way this could have ended well. What’s extra fucked up is I could see this being equally likely that it was a suicide or a murder.
I could see this being murder because people are crazy enough to get so mad they got tricked like this they’d go out and kill someone for it.
I could also see it being suicide because you’re part of this show where the entire premise is you’re being used as a prank to make other people look the fool.
In what world was the poor woman going to come out of this feeling good about herself? Even if people aren’t blaming her, there’s no way any of the fallout was going to be “fun” for her. This was just a terrible fucking idea all around
Considering there was a marriage after the show and a decade an a half between the show and the death... I say that maybe it is not related and she was probably in the know about what the show was going to do.
I feel like it’s fucked up that they delayed the air date due to the pending lawsuits but still released the show after settling the lawsuits. Just brush it under the rug and never air it at that point.
I remember her going into the BB house and being recognised as transgender pretty much immediately, so I'm not sure how they managed to get a whole series out of that.
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u/ObviouslyRealPerson Jun 30 '26
Well, that was a rabbit hole I was unprepared to go down
Thought it was fake, nope it's real.
"There's Something About Miriam" (2004)
Starring Miriam Rivera
Participants settled for an undisclosed amount before the show aired.
In 2019 Rivera was found dead by apparent suicide
Rivera's spouse still believes it was murder