Free Republic

A state appeals court upheld the murder convictions of two East Bay men today for their roles in battering and strangling a transgender teenager after learning she was biologically male. The killing of 17-year-old Gwen Araujo of Newark in 2002 drew national attention to incidents of violence against transgender people, which often include defense claims that the victim provoked the attack by having sex under false pretenses. In this case, lawyers for both defendants argued that the slaying was manslaughter at most, because their clients had acted in the heat of passion when they learned the person with whom they...

FREMONT, Calif. - The name on the birth certificate was Edward Araujo Jr., but the teenager preferred the first name Gwen. At age 17, before getting a chance to make the name change official, Araujo was beaten and strangled after the people she thought were her friends found out she was biologically male. This week, Araujo's family asked a court for a posthumous name change to Gwen Amber Rose Araujo. "She's Gwen to me, and I'm her mother," Sylvia Guerrero said outside the courthouse. "This is who she was. She's transgender and she's Gwen." Superior Court Commissioner Thomas Surh called...

Hayward -- One of three men accused of killing a 17-year-old Newark transgender nearly three years ago testified today that he participated in the attack after learning that Gwen Araujo was not the woman he thought he'd had sex with. Testifying for the first time at his retrial on murder charges, Jose Merel, 25, said he was disgusted when friends at a party revealed that Araujo, who called herself Lida and with whom Merel had previously had anal sex, was biologically male. "It's hard to explain," Merel said in a Hayward courtroom of the way he felt on Oct. 3,...