Shattered Lives, Broken Silence: Jaheem Hererra, Tesia Samara, Angie Zapata and Gwen Araujo

Tesia Samara was a little bit older, 15 to be exact, when she gave up on a world that couldn’t understand her and refused to even try. She knew that she was a woman encased in a boy’s body, and she was going about her plans to change her gender in all of the right ways. She did the research, she knew what her options were, and she planned to take steps to become a woman. However, the taunting at school was overpowering. She even wrote to her teachers, begging them to help her or at least to understand her perspective, but when you are gay in Texas you are unwelcome; when you are transgendered, you don’t stand a chance. She gave up and ended her own life, but I can only wonder how long it might have been before someone ended it for her had she not taken matters into her own hands.

Transgender murders have also made the news again recently with the first degree murder conviction of Allen Andrade for the beating death of his girlfriend, Angie Zapata, whom he did not know was transgendered. The rapid response of the jury in this case shows that in 2009 there is a growing sympathy and awareness of the fact that hate crimes such as this one should not go unpunished. This is a far cry from the voluntary manslaughter conviction of Jaron Nabors and the second degree murder convictions of Michael Magidson, Jose Merel, and Jason Cazares who beat to death Gwen Araujo in 2002. In Gwen’s case, it took two trials before the jury could reach a decision that did not result in a deadlock, and even then members of the jury still placed blame on Gwen for what they viewed as her “deception” in portraying herself as a woman when, in fact, she was genetically male.

While the fact that Zapata’s jury acted swiftly and her killer will be spending his life behind bars is encouraging, it is not enough. It will not bring her back, nor will it bring back any of the others whose lives have been lost due to self-inflicted means or outside violence. Labeling it a hate crime doesn’t change it either. All violent crimes are hate crimes because they carry within the nature of the act some degree of animosity on the part of the perpetrator toward the victim. It is not just the schools that are at fault, it is society as a whole. We need to rethink our perspectives and learn to live in acceptance of others, even if they live their lives outside of what any one of us perceives as the norm. Tolerance needs to be taught at home. Even if you disagree with someone else’s lifestyle, that is their choice and they should be allowed the freedom to live that choice without fear.  Teachers, administrators and parents need to be more actively involved. Labeling, even in jest, needs to be stopped. When we learn to accept the other as merely a mirror image of the self, distorted but still essentially the same, then, perhaps, we can all live free from fear.