Mother of murdered teen speaks
By: Bernadette DeSalles
Issue date: 4/21/10
http://www.csusignal.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinterFriendly&uStory_id=819f64ba-968d-4edf-8a67-01bcfd438e48Last 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."
