Sex with the Imperfect Stranger
by Patrick Califia
 

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"Why should a transsexual be a menace to you?"
-- Riki Wilchins, founder of the direct action group Transexual Menace

November 20, 2002, is a day of remembrance for the transgendered community to honor our beloved dead. This custom, begun three years ago by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, has grown until this year it includes events in 35 cities in the U.S. and abroad. In 2001, transactivists often said that one person was reported killed every month because of prejudice against transgendered people. This phraseology is used because not all of the victims of prejudice against transgenderism are themselves cross-dressers or transsexual. They include, for example, people like Calpernia Addams' boyfriend, Barry Winchell. He was a soldier who was killed by two other men in his unit who were incensed that his lover was a transgendered woman.¹ Two dozen such deaths have been reported this year.² One of these killings took place on October 3, the body discovered about two weeks later. The recent death of Gwen Araujo (born Eddie) makes this an especially somber day.

As I write this I am looking at an undated photograph of Gwen (who sometimes called herself Lida). She is wearing a hooded sweatshirt, holding a baby and smiling, looking like any high school girl baby-sitting for one of her mother's friends.³ It is painful and disturbing to imagine her dead body, wrapped in a blanket, buried in a shallow grave in a remote campground.⁴ When one of the people who had witnessed her murder led police to that hiding place, she still had a rope wrapped around her neck. She had been stabbed several times and beaten. When I read the account of her injuries, I feel as if I too am a witness of the fury and, yes, terror that reportedly drove a group of young men to murder her. It is as if she has to be killed over and over again. This is a common (if such savagery can be described by such a banal word) characteristic of the murders of transgendered women. It is clear that the perpetrators of these vicious crimes are trying to obliterate something else, something beyond her -- something, I believe, that they hate and fear within themselves.

Michael Magidson, 27; Jason Nabors, 19; Paul Merel Jr., 25; and his brother, Jose Merel, 24, were arrested on suspicion of homicide. Magidson, Nabors and Jose Merel were charged with murder and the commission of a hate crime.⁵ (California is one of only five states that include gender identity in their hate crime laws.) A fourth suspect, Jason Cazares, 22, was recently charged solely with murder.⁶

On October 3, the day that she died, Gwen was 17 years old. According to news accounts, she went to a party that was fated to turn ugly. Although Gwen had worn women's clothes for several years, she had never worn a skirt in public before.⁷ She was apparently nervous about this, because she took a pair of pants with her to change into if the more feminine outfit became uncomfortable or dangerous. At the party, she reportedly had a few beers and had anal sex with Jose Merel, a boy she had a crush on, and perhaps with a friend of his, Michael Magidson. Things started to go wrong when Nicole Brown, the girlfriend of Jose's brother, followed Gwen into the bathroom (or, by some accounts, took her in there) and discovered that she wasn't a biological female. "It's a man, let's go," she called out, and the attack began.

This makes it sound like the people at the party had no idea that Gwen Araujo was not born male. But according to one of Araujo's friends, Stephanie Baumann, she didn't pass. "I don't understand how those men could say they had no idea he was a guy. If you just saw him, you'd know," she told reporters from the San Jose Mercury News.⁸ Several other details reported in this case do not ring true. It is reported that Araujo had an altercation with the suspects about a week before the party. (She had also been found unconscious in front of a church near her home a few weeks before the murder. Her mother said she had been beaten.)⁹

This was someone who had been insisting on wearing makeup, women's clothing and using a female name since she was 14. She had frequently been taunted and threatened. She'd been unable to find a job locally because of her gender expression. Why would she willingly attend a social event with people who hated her -- unless she was lured to that party? Or, as one source suggests, she was dating one of the men who are now charged with killing her.¹⁰ The "gender check" apparently performed by one of the arrested men's girlfriend is also suspicious. The whole thing sounds like a setup. It is quite reasonable to ask if the sex that reportedly took place was consensual. Paul Merel says his girlfriend woke him up and made him leave the party with her when the attack began, but he also says he saw Araujo on the floor with her skirt pulled up. That sort of exposure smacks of sexual humiliation if not outright rape.¹¹ It's also possible that if one of the men present was her boyfriend, he was utterly and completely humiliated when Gwen's biological sex was publicly exposed, and was so afraid for his own reputation that he became enraged and violent. A more accurate account of what happened probably will not emerge until the trial.

In a small town like Newark, California, it is doubtful that everyone at the party was completely ignorant of Gwen's gender status. Gossip like that travels far and fast. And the defendants were well-enough known to her for their names to appear in a Harry Potter address book that police found in her belongings.¹² Did an entire group of people conspire to expose and punish someone who had been getting on their nerves for years? Did the fact that they had gotten away with assaulting her a week earlier encourage them to escalate the violence? "We're dealing with a number of people [at the party] who could have helped, stepped in, prevented or reported this," says Newark Police Lt. Lance Morrison. "None of them did."¹³

Gwen's mother reported her missing when she did not come home from the party. Scary rumors about her fate circulated for two weeks until one of the party-goers cracked. Jaron Nabors contacted the police and took them to where Gwen's body was buried, 150 miles into the Sierra Nevada foothills. The location was so remote that it could only be reached by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Morrison described the crime scene as "haunting and gruesome."¹⁴

I'm not sure why this murder of a transgendered person has gotten so much more attention in the press than previous cases like the June 2001 murder of two-spirited Fredericka Martinez, a 16-year-old Navajo from Cortez, Colorado.¹⁵ Bay Area cultural critic David Steinberg speculates it's because the death took place in Newark, California, near the "proudly open-minded, relatively diversity-accepting San Francisco Bay Area," and because she had strong support and acceptance from her family.¹⁶ Her youth and beauty make her a sympathetic figure. She had been driven out of public school by her bigoted peers, she had problems with drugs and alcohol. Maybe the poignant deaths of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepherd have tenderized the conscience of the mass media. The high school that could not tolerate Araujo's attendance was, ironically enough, producing The Laramie Project, a play about the Wyoming murder of Shepherd, a gay man who was pistol whipped, tied to a fence and left to freeze to death by two men who later claimed he had propositioned them.¹⁷

Araujo's case has generated so much indignation that some gay activists have expressed concern about the defendants being treated fairly, and attempted to remind antiviolence advocates of the flaws in our criminal justice system. Bill Dobbs is a gay civil libertarian and a member of Queer Watch, a gay justice group that has lobbied GLBT organizations to take a position against the death penalty. Dobbs questions the addition of hate crimes charges and indeed questions the entire concept of hate crimes enhancement. "Hate crime?" he says. "This is a horrible killing, and murder charges have been brought. Murder is a million-dollar word. Prosecuting this as a hate crime undercuts the horror of intentional killing. The push for hate crimes laws comes from a mistaken belief that we can stamp out ugly deeds with longer prison sentences. More 'law and order' will not solve the social problem here, hatred towards GLBT people. Gwen Araujo's death raises many issues, including how often transgender persons are attacked. Those issues deserve our attention; at the same time, we must consider carefully what we demand of the criminal justice system. It is worrisome when a group like the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition calls for maximum punishment long before any trial has begun. Those charged in connection with Gwen Araujo's death deserve fair legal treatment. We must not lose sight of justice."¹⁸

Stories about Gwen's death appeared on CNN, in USA Today and in the New York Times. Although generally sympathetic in tone, articles about the case often referred to Araujo as a cross-dresser and used male pronouns. (Araujo's mother suffered from the same problem, referring to her transgendered child as "he" even while revealing her plans to bury Gwen in female clothing and put the name Gwen on her headstone.) But a spate of letters from readers who felt this was an insult to the dead girl moved the San Francisco Chronicle to editorialize about the "pronoun problem," and an article they ran about Jack Thompson, a female-to-male teenager, was carefully edited to refer to him as such.¹⁹ Reporter Kelly St. John insisted upon this usage, and the newspaper is considering the updated Associated Press style which calls for use of the pronoun consistent with the way a transgendered individual lives publicly. (Old guidelines had insisted on using the birth name and sex assigned at birth until after sex-change surgery.)

Other signs of positive social change have been noted. The spokeswoman for San Francisco's Community United Against Violence, Tina D'Elia, praised the Newark Police Department officer who handled Araujo's case for his unique sensitivity. It would have been nice if Newark city leaders had publicly expressed their indignation about the crime or attended Araujo's funeral, but at least they drew hostile fire in the local press for keeping their heads down.²⁰ "Kids are dying out there because they don't meet narrow gender norms," said Riki Wilchins, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Gender Public Advocacy Coalition. "I'm confident change is coming as crimes like these raise people's awareness. Unfortunately, it's not happening quick enough."²¹

Sadly, the killing of Araujo did not end her persecution. She was buried on October 25 in a casket adorned with butterflies. Her mother had dressed her in a lace blouse and had her fingernails done in rainbow glitter. Rev. Jeff Finley eulogized Gwen, saying, "I wonder how many times Eddie cried in secret, wondering, where do I fit in? Maybe we were not there enough for you, because we did not understand."²² But Araujo's family was probably remembering the night before, when the notorious publicity hound and homo-hate-monger Fred Phelps dared to show up with a band of 23 of his crazed followers and picket her mother's house, bearing signs that said, "Eddie's in hell."²³

Araujo's case has been prominently featured on Phelps' Website, www.godhatesfags.com, as well as the Website of the Army of God and other right-wing Christian organizations. Right-wingers were also quick to take umbrage at the compassionate and respectful tone taken by more liberal newspapers. One critic ridiculed "the liberal Hate Crimes crowd" and "the ridiculous whining that began right after Araujo's death, about the media not using the 'correct' pronouns or names in their coverage of the story... Never mind that journalists are required to report the facts of a given news story... such points as a subject's gender and legal name."²⁴ I've yet to see an article about the case that did not include Araujo's birth name and the sex she was assigned at birth. But even such a trifling matter as including the name that she preferred to be called is seen by conservatives as a very big step down the slippery slope toward (gasp) social acceptance of transgendered people. "[P]art of the campaign to further 'understanding of transgender issues' is to indoctrinate, or to use a more politically correct term, to educate children on such subjects in school," sniped the right-wing Chron Watch Website. The person responsible for this editorial seems oblivious to the fact that Gwen Araujo was a child who went to school, a school where she found no safety. And school systems that keep silent about homosexuality and transgenderism teach queer bashers -- taught the murderers of Gwen Araujo -- that it was socially acceptable to target butch girls and femme boys.

The most twisted response to this 5'6", slightly built teenager's death has to be an article by Zach Calef which appeared in the Iowa State Daily. Let's not forget that Araujo not only suffered blunt force trauma to the head, she was also tied up, stabbed in the face and body, and dragged into the garage where a rope was tied around her neck by a crowd of assailants, who strangled her. But Calef terms this violence as "simply a reaction to a form of rape." Throughout this screed, Calef refers to Araujo as "he" and says, "He tricked them into having sex with him, but if they would have known his sex, they wouldn't have been interested. That is just as bad as rape." He concedes, "Given the circumstances, murder is a bit much," but suggests Magidson, et al. were "not in a normal mind set when they acted ... probably 'temporarily insane'" and so should be "charged with manslaughter or something along those lines." Calef even has the gall to argue that the murder is not a hate crime, because according to him, that would mean "the underlying reason for the beating was Araujo's sexual orientation. And that is not the case. The men did what they did because Araujo violated them. He used lies and deception to trick them into having sex. He was not honest with them and had he been, none of this would have happened. A hate crime should not even be considered. No one killed him because he was a cross-dresser. These men were truly violated. They were raped."²⁵

It's fascinating that Calef assumes that he knows so much about what happened between this transgendered teenager and the men who reportedly fucked and then murdered her. His scenario is based on a dreary stereotype that is horribly familiar to anyone who has followed legal cases in which ostensibly straight men are charged with assaulting or killing gay men or transgendered people. These defendants always argue that it was the queer who came on to them, who used deceit or force in an attempt to wring some sexual gratification out of them. Defense attorneys try (with a depressing amount of success) to get judges and juries to see their clients' violent behavior much as Calef does -- as a perfectly understandable state of rage that springs from a feeling of having been violated. This strategy relies on widespread social acceptance of the belief that this is what straight men are supposed to do when their heterosexual identities are threatened. They are supposed to murder in defense of their masculinity. Because if one of them doesn't do this, if he does not violently repudiate the possibility that he found it pleasurable to have sexual contact with someone who was not born female, then he must be queer himself. (What often goes unstated is the corollary that this would then make him liable to stigma and assault.)

Sex with a new person is always a risk, whether you're on a blind date or hiring a sex worker. You are always going to come out of such an encounter with information about the other person that you didn't have before. (And they are going to carry away some secrets about you, as well.) I am always skeptical about the claims made by johns who say they had no idea the gorgeous girl they screwed was "really a guy" [sic]. But even if his astonishment is real, what is the appropriate response? If I find out that somebody I had sex with is really married, and this is a huge disappointment to me, or morally offensive, does that justify killing them? Of course not. Suppose I've tried something new, something I never thought I would like, and after the pleasure is over, I feel upset about what I've done. Remorse is often the precursor to self-knowledge. So I have a lot to think about. I may decide I never want to do that again, and I may work through my shame or anxiety and integrate this new pleasure into my repertoire. What I absolutely ought not to do is attempt to obliterate the person who set this uncomfortable but pretty common process in motion. If you don't get what you want out of a sexual encounter, you may have very powerful feelings about it, but the thing to do is put your pants or panties back on, and take your feelings with you when you leave.

The number of gay men or transgendered people who feel powerful enough to try to pressure a straight guy into having sex with them -- let alone actually rape him -- is miniscule. The victim in such cases is usually deliberately sought out by the attackers, hunted down and intimidated, battered or slaughtered. Violence against sexual minority people is a sport. And the number of straight men who occasionally or habitually have sex with other men or with male-to-female transgendered people is so high that the word "heterosexual" ought to always have quotes around it. Given the fact that the men accused of killing Araujo are known to have harassed her before they took her life, it seems highly unlikely that they were shocked by her genitalia. Perhaps what really happened is that they were caught enjoying sex with someone who was not a socially sanctioned object of desire. They were, it's reasonable to suspect, quite happy to make use of her body as long as that activity wasn't a matter of public knowledge. This would make them hypocrites, not rape victims.

The creepy illogic that informs Calef's infamous article is so pervasive that the right wing is using the defamatory stereotype of transgendered people as sexual predators to attack civil rights legislation. The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) has protested attack ads circulated shortly before voters were asked to retain or repeal an equal rights ordinance in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This bedroom community of less than 23,000 people has been under a relentless right-wing siege to overturn its civil rights ordinance ever since it was passed in 1997. All previous attempts have failed. Tom Monaghan, an anti-abortion activist and wealthy ex-CEO of Domino's Pizza, former Green Bay Packer Reggie White, a religious soul group called the Winans Sisters and Ypsilanti Citizens Voting Yes for Equal Rights not Special Rights are among the opposition. Ypsilanti Campaign for Equality, which does not have the big budget of the forces for repeal, has gone door-to-door to counter ads that feature a picture of a preoperative transsexual with the caption, "Will you vote YES to protect your daughter... your granddaughter... from being forced to use the girl's bathroom with men like this?"²⁶

NTAC chair Vanessa Edwards Foster responds, "It's misleading, and very provocative. They implant the message of 'protect your daughters' with the false image that male-to-female transgenders all somehow rape or molest. It's only a step away from the Klan movie Birth of a Nation inferring a need to protect your daughters by saying that all black men wanted to rape white women. These broad generalizations are not only inaccurate, they're defamatory and damaging to an entire class of people."²⁷

Speaking as a preoperative transgendered person who is sometimes forced to use public restrooms, I want to point out that we are the people who are especially at risk there. Even when I go into a stall and lock the door, I am always afraid to take my pants down while other men make use of nearby urinals and stalls. It has been more than a year since anybody challenged my gender identity in public. But if the difference between my face and my genitals is ever going to become an explosive issue, it is there, and I hate it. Gwen Araujo was someone's daughter. She was someone's granddaughter. And her biological sex was exposed in a place that was supposed to be private, by an intrusive straight woman, who may have then incited the men at the party to kill her. Non-transgendered people don't need protection from us in public bathrooms or elsewhere. We need protection from them.

Among the people that Araujo needed protection from was her own therapist. Between the ages of 14 and 16, she is reported to have worked with Linda Skerbec. Skerbec is associated with the Focus on the Family ministry, that bizarre organization in Colorado that sponsors "National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day." Focus on the Family endorses so-called "reparative therapy" to change gay people into heterosexuals, a dubious and ineffective practice that has been condemned by the American Psychological Association. After Araujo's death, Skerbec told one reporter that she was about to persuade her client to "move beyond the label" of transgender and "claim the sexual identity that matched his anatomy. To me, Eddie was very much a male, a creative, sensitive male. But I worried some. I knew that kids like Eddie could be hurt."²⁸ Why, yes -- by mental health professionals who are unethical, poorly trained and blinded by hateful religious ideology. With "support" like this, no wonder Araujo had problems with drugs and alcohol, couldn't pursue her education and engaged in other self-destructive behavior.

This is the kind of violence that legal reform cannot address. Transsexuals are hated because our existence breaks up the hegemony of "normal" social sex-roles and compulsory heterosexuality. In this era, the existence of "opposite sexes," male and female, is thought to be dictated by biology. This view of nature ignores a plethora of gender-fucking and same-sex activity among mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles and insects.²⁹ Gwen Araujo had to teach herself how to put on makeup. When she put on a skirt, she was perceived as pretending to be a woman, being a cross-dresser, going in drag. But her sisters and her mother had also been taught how to "put on" the clothing and mannerisms of women. If being a human female was a simple matter of obeying the dictates of biology, how much of this conditioning would be necessary? Why would it be necessary for our society to enforce such horrendous penalties upon people who violate these norms? Of course our physicality, our genetic inheritance, plays a huge role in our personalities and the presentation of self. But transsexuals are as much a part of nature as female babies born with vulvas and wombs who grow up to be feminine straight women. We belong here, too.

1. Thomas Hackett, "The Execution of Private Barry Winchell," Rolling Stone, March 2, 2000. Posted on-line at www.davidclemens.com/
   gaymilitary/rolstobarry.htm.
2. Information supplied by the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition website, www.ntac.org.
3. The Free Radical, "A Real Horror Story: The Murder of Eddie Araujo," http:/1.editthispage.com/2002/11/01.
4. Niesha Gates, "Body Found in El Dorado County Identified," The Sacramento Bee, October 18, 2002. www.sacbee.com/content/
   news/story/4842263p-5855552c.html.
5. "Anti-transgender Violence is Common," Associated Press, October 20, 2002, posted on www.geocities.com/dana_rivers_2000/
   featurednews.html.
6. "Fourth Suspect Charged in Transgender Death," In Brief/Fremont, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2000,
   www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sbriefs20.3nov20.story?null.
7. Karen de Sá, "Teen's Sad Tale," San Jose, California, The Mercury News, October 26, 2002. Posted on-line at www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/
   news/local/4374271./htm.
8. Jessie Seyfer and Lisa Fernandez, "Parents of Arrested Man Say He Did Not Kill Cross-Dressing Teen," San Jose Mercury News, October 21, 2002. Posted on-line at www.geocities.com/dana_rivers_2000/
   featurednews.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Associated Press, "Three Charged with Hate Crime-Murder of Cross-Dressing Teen," October 19, 2002, posted on-line at www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/
    10/19/teen.killed.ap/
12. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
13. "Three Men Arraigned in Death of Transgendered Teen," National Transgender Advocacy Coalition press release, October 19, 2002. Posted on-line at www.ntac.org/pr/release.asp?did=50.
14. Ibid.
15. David Steinberg, "Comes Naturally: RIP, Gwen Araujo: Uncommon Response to an All-Too-Common Crime," The Spectator, Issue 1255, October 31, 2002. Posted on-line at www.spectator.net/1255/
    pages/1255_steinberg.html.
16. Steinberg, et al.
17. Michelle Locke, "Life Imitated Life as Show Goes On," Associated Press, November 9, 2002. Posted on-line at www.cjonline.com/stories/
    111002/art_laramie.shtml.
18. Bill Dobbs, e-mail interview by Patrick Califia, November 22, 2002.
19. Christopher Heredia, "Transgender Teen's Slaying Shakes Nation," San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2002. Posted on-line at www.glsen.org/templates/news/
    record.html?section=12&record;=1422. Also see Annie Nakao, "What's In A Pronoun? We're all Figuring It Out," San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 2002. Posted on-line at www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cig?file=/chronicle/
    archive/2002/11/07/DD116742.DTL.
20. Rob Kuznia, "City's Response to Slaying Under Fire," The Argus, October 31, 2002. Posted on-line at www.theargusonline.com/Stories/
    0,1413,83%257E1968%257E960612,00.html.
21. Heredia, op. cit.
22. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
23. "We stand in Solidarity with Gwen's Family," www.roanoke7.com.
24. Cinnamon Stillwell, "The Chron Teaches Transgender 101," Chron Watch: Striving for Balance in the News, November 11, 2002, www.chronwatch.com/editorial/
    contentDisplay.asp?aid=802.
25. Zach Calef, "Double Standard in Reactions to Rape," Iowa State Daily, October 24, 2002. Posted on-line at www.iowastatedaily.com/vnews/display.v/
    ART/2002/10/24/3db7765f45381.
26. "NTAC Decries Cheap Shot Tactics in Ypsilanti Campaign," National Transgender Advocacy Coalition press release, November 3, 2002. Posted on-line at www.chicagogender.com/news_items/htm.
27. Ibid.
28. Karen de Sá, op. cit.
29. Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, New York City: St. Martin's Press/Stonewall Inn Editions, 1999. On page 1, Bagemihl says, "Any book on homosexuality and transgender in animals is necessarily unfinished, a work in progress. The subject is so vast, the types of behaviors so varied, and the number of species involved so large, as to defy any attempt at comprehensiveness."

Patrick Califia is the author and editor of several fiction and nonfiction books which investigate various aspects of sexual politics. These include Public Sex, a collection of essays, Melting Point and Macho Sluts, short-story collections, and Sensuous Magic, a guide for adventurous couples. Patrick's newest books are Sex Changes, an examination of the politics of transsexuality, Diesel Fuel, a volume of passionate lesbian poetry, and No Mercy, another collection of stories. You can visit Patrick's web site at http://www.patcalifia.com.