Mother of murdered teen speaks

Last Wednesday in the Event Center, students and faculty listened to guest speaker Sylvia Guerrero, the mother of Gwen Araujo, a transgendered woman who was killed in Newark, California in October 2002. Ms. Guerrero was here to tell her daughter's story, discuss being the mother of a transgendered woman and how her daughter's gender led to her death at age seventeen.

A transgendered person is someone whose personal idea of gender does not match up with his or her assigned gender role. In Gwen 's situation, she felt from birth, as Edward Araujo Jr., that she was really a girl inside struggling to get out. As Edward struggled through adolescence the problem became so unbearable that he had to come out to his mother about the whole thing. Eddie "hysterically" told his mother, according to Guerrero, "I am a girl, not a boy."

From that moment on, Guerrero pledged to help her son become the girl she later called Gwen Amber Rose. In fact, after Gwen died, her mother officially had her name changed to honor her child's last wish to have the world see her as female.

Guerrero said that the decision to help her son transform into a young girl would turn out to be the most difficult thing she would ever have to do. After Gwen came out to the rest of the world, she and her mother were treated with extreme hostility and shunned from that moment on. There were those who were supportive, the majority were appalled. Occasionally when family and friends would talk to them, it was with such condemnation and disgust that they'd flee just to get away from it.

The accusations were always the same, Guerrero said. "Sylvia, you are a horrible mother to support and allow your son to do this and Gwen will only experience heartache and misery for going against the will of God."

"But what was I to do", exclaimed Guerrero. "This was my child and as a mother I had an obligation to help ease my child's pain and do whatever I had to help. At that point I made my decision , it wasn't about me, it was about the well-being of my child."

Guerrero detailed helping Gwen fulfill her desire to live as a female, to be able to go to school and live as normally as possible. The plan was to relocate to another part of the city and start going to a new school where no one knew Edward and would accept Gwen unknowing. The idea for Gwen was to live from that point on as a girl until she and her mother could manage to save enough money to have a sex-change operation to complete the conversion into a female.

For a time everything was going great and Gwen was adjusting well to her new school and friends, until the night that she was discovered by some friends at a party. Araujo was beaten and choked to death, and her body was buried in the mountains.

What is particularly alarming about what happened to Araujo is that there is a growing trend of violence and hate crimes targeting gays, lesbians and transgendered people. Guerrero spoke at California State University, Stanislaus as an "advocate for transgender rights," and her mission is to raise public awareness about these issues and to help prevent what happened to Araujo from happening to someone else we may know.