Life after Gwen

Sylvia Guerrero
Thursday, January 26, 2006
From the San Francisco Chronicle

I am not sure how I expected to feel at this point. When my daughter Gwen, a transgender teenager, was brutally murdered on Oct. 4, 2002, I was sure that I would never feel whole again. Looking back, I didn't yet know exactly what "transgender" meant or how to fully embrace my child's identity. But I knew one thing: I wanted justice for my child.

I thought that maybe I'd feel better on the day when the four suspects in her murder were brought to justice. More than three years and three months since Gwen's murder that day is finally here. On Friday, these men are being sentenced to prison terms for their actions, two of them convicted of second-degree murder and two taking plea bargains for voluntary manslaughter. I guess I hoped that once we got to the sentencing date, the pain would end and I could get back to my life. But it hasn't and I can't.

No amount of justice can return the part of me that these men took when they killed Gwen. The closure that people keep talking about hasn't come. It would be so much easier to write that it had. After all, that is what most people want to read: The system worked; my family is whole; the story is over. It would be comforting and allow us to get on with our lives. Of the many things I'm feeling, closure isn't one of them.

I'm angry. Angry that Gwen's brothers and her nieces and nephews won't get to grow up knowing her the way her aunts, uncles, older sister and I did. Angry that instead of celebrating her birthday, we get together each year to commemorate her death. Angry that, in both trials, the defendants tried to blame Gwen for her own murder. Angry that other young lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender kids continue to face the discrimination she did in our public schools and our workforce.

I'm also grateful. Grateful that my family and our friends rose to the challenge and sat through two gruesome and explicit criminal trials to make sure that everyone knew that Gwen was loved for who she was. I'm grateful for the support we've all received from perfect strangers who have told us in-person and through e-mail that we are in their thoughts and prayers. I'm grateful for the remorse that two of the defendants and some of their family members have expressed to me and my family.

And I'm sad. Sad that I'll never get to see Gwen grow into the beautiful woman she would have become. Sad that four men chose to end my daughter's life, and throw away their own simply because they thought they were acting like "real men." And sad that other transgender women have been killed since Gwen's murder and that we don't have a realistic end in sight to that violence.

Within this mix of emotions, though, the one that I hold onto most dearly is hope. Since that tragic night, my own family has grown by two beautiful grandchildren. More and more parents are supporting their transgender children. California has become the country's most protective state for transgender people. And just this month, a new law has been proposed in Sacramento, the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act, authored by Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, and sponsored by Equality California, an LGBT civil-rights lobbying group, to protect people from being blamed for their own murder.

Maybe the reason I don't have closure around Gwen's death is that there is still work to do. If I've learned anything since Gwen's murder, it is that hope alone is not enough. Each of us who hopes to live in a state where our families are protected needs to work toward making California that place. For instance, boys and girls in schools throughout the Bay Area need to hear, firsthand, how important it is to be themselves and to respect each other's differences.

None of us can change the way the world was on Oct. 4, 2002. But each of us now has an important role to play in creating a state where we can celebrate more birthdays and commemorate fewer murders.

Sylvia Guerrero is the mother of Gwen Araujo and an activist for LGBT civil rights. She speaks at schools around the Bay Area through the Gwen Araujo Transgender Education Fund administered by the Horizons Foundation.

Katrina may have changed political landscape

Sept. 17, 2005, 7:13PM
Demographic shifts caused by huge relocation of evacuees could tip Louisiana's balance


By JOHANNA NEUMAN and RICHARD B. SCHMITT
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON - Government officials and legal experts have begun wrestling with an intriguing question posed by the evacuation of New Orleans: What happens to the politics of a region when a significant part of the electorate suddenly disappears?

The migration of hundreds of thousands of people from this urban center, many of them low-income and black, could have a dramatic effect on the political makeup of a state delicately balanced between the two major parties. If most of the evacuees choose not to return, Katrina's political legacy could be that it made Louisiana a more Republican state.

How Katrina may have rewritten the political map of New Orleans and of Louisiana is just one of many questions the Gulf states are pondering in the aftermath of a natural disaster of such scope that it may have permanently altered the region's demographics and economy.

Working for voting rights
Civil rights groups are focused on keeping track of Louisiana's displaced black voters and on ensuring that they can continue to vote in the districts they left behind until they make a decision to permanently resettle elsewhere.

Ernest Johnson, head of the Louisiana NAACP, has called for Congress to pass emergency legislation to extend special protections of the Voting Rights Act that expire in 2007. The law is meant to ensure access to the polls for black voters.

Johnson says Katrina has potentially disenfranchised 1.5 million voters, many of them black.

"A lot of voters have been displaced, and they could be out of their voting jurisdiction, with toxins in the water, for a year or more," Johnson said. The expiring provision of the law requires jurisdictions in 15 states to clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to ensure the changes do not disadvantage minority groups.

"We were going to fight for the extension anyway. Now, we want to move up the debate, to talk about this in 2005 instead of 2007, so we do not have to worry," Johnson said.

The provision, he said, would protect voters as precincts are moved and absentee ballots are mailed.

It is still impossible to know how many evacuees will choose to make new homes outside the Gulf Coast and how many will return to rebuild.

In a briefing to a Senate oversight committee, a senior Federal Emergency Management Agency official said the agency thought it would need to find at least temporary housing for 450,000 families.

More than half of the New Orleans evacuees initially landed in solidly Republican Texas.

Their presence is expected to trigger no immediate political change in the GOP stronghold. But if enough choose to stay, they could accelerate the growing minority influence in the state, where whites recently lost their majority status, said Charlie Cook, an independent political analyst and, as a Shreveport native, a lifelong student of Louisiana politics.

"Other than the Okies leaving the Dust Bowl, I can't think of any other time in American history where this many people have just up and moved," he said. "We're all starting to wonder what the long-term political consequences will be in terms of demographics and voting trends."

Unlike the migration of Oklahomans during the Great Depression, which lasted for years, this shift of population — whose consequences could be lasting — occurred during a few days.

One immediate casualty may be Louisiana's unusual political culture.

In the jargon of political consultants, Louisiana is a "pink state." After voting twice for President Clinton, the state voted twice for President George W. Bush. It recently elected its first Republican U.S. senator since Reconstruction — David Vitter.

But unlike its solid red-state Republican neighbors, in Louisiana social and cultural issues have been less important, Cook said. The state's particular blend of cultures — which includes the mix of French Canadians, Spaniards and Creoles who settled its southern region — distinguishes it from Mississippi and Alabama. Its sizable Catholic population has resisted the evangelical agenda that resonates with much of the South.

Louisianans tend to concentrate on economic issues, Cook said.

New Orleans was the hub of that political culture, which was heavily black and Democratic. What no one knows is what the city will be if and when it is rebuilt.

"Those who landed in Rhode Island or Utah, I doubt will stay," and may well head back to their hometown, Cook said. "But those in Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Dallas or Houston are more likely to stay because it is not such an alien culture. And of those who come back, what will the mix be? More African-Americans? More whites? You could argue either way."

Johnson said he was hoping that evacuees, once relocated, would contact their local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapters so that the Louisiana branch could re-establish contact.

"The thing I'm worried about is getting New Orleans people back to New Orleans," he said.

Legal and political experts said that if enough evacuees chose not to return, the state Legislature, which has the authority to redraw congressional districts, could take that step — a move that could realign power in Louisiana. Any redistricting, however, would be subject to Justice Department approval and undoubtedly would face a court fight.

For now, not many in Washington are eager to talk about questions that sound the slightest bit partisan. Most are fearful that it would look unseemly to talk politics while their constituents are without food, electricity, clothing, housing and even the comfort of their families.

Although the focus of the relief effort is for now necessarily on preserving life, Richard Hasen, an elections-law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said that "at some point, we have to think about the democratic processes and making sure the people who live there are adequately represented."