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She should be living her life in relative obscurity - just another face in the crowd to most people.
But she was silenced.
Some people were so threatened (or disturbed or offended or ... ) by some choices she made that they beat her and murdered her.
And because she was silenced, Gwen Araujo's life has spoken volumes to people.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Gwen was born Eddie Araujo Jr. A transgender teen, Gwen lived in Newark in the East Bay and was a party girl.
The Mercury News reported that, according to testimony at a preliminary hearing, two men who had sex, oral and anal, with Gwen later discovered that she was biologically male and beat and murdered her. Two other men helped bury her body near Lake Tahoe; one of these men, who later confessed to police and led them to the body, provided the testimony.
As details of Gwen's death came out in October 2002, I was hit hard by the vicious and senseless murder. One chief reason was that Gwen was 17, the same age as my youngest son at the time.
As a parent, I had asked myself years earlier, how would I react if one of my sons told me he was gay?
My answer was that I would still love my son but also, to be honest, that I would need time to adjust to the news.
Now I asked, how would I react if my child was killed because he was gay or transgender? I could not fathom how heartbreaking that must be for a parent.
Transgender is not the same as homosexual. Transgender people differ from mainstream heterosexuality not in whom they are attracted to, but in their definition of self. While their biological identity cannot be denied, it is the opposite of how they view themselves. Someone born male who identifies as transgender is the classic "woman trapped in a man's body."
Gwen had sex with men who later killed her. She would not, however, have called it gay sex. She considered herself female and may have seen her penis as a birth defect.
For years, I knew next to nothing about transsexualism.
The idea that anyone would want to change their sex was mainly a cause for jokes - among my friends at school as well as in movies and on TV (where, to too large of an extent, it still is).
Beyond the jokes, my attitude was, "So what if you get an operation and call yourself a woman? At a genetic level, your DNA still has Y chromosomes."
It was an abstract argument, but the concept itself was abstract - who even knew anyone like that?
Then I crossed paths with two transgender people. The first encounter lasted only 10 or 20 seconds, but both led me to rethink matters.
About seven years ago, I was working in human resources at a company when we were told that an employee from a nearby building was "transitioning" - a process that takes at least a year - to become a woman.
She was occasionally going to have dealings with the benefits department, which was next to us in staffing. If we saw her, we were told, treat her as a woman and with the respect accorded to any employee.
I did see her once, a few days later.
She was dressed completely as a woman, but she also stood more than six feet tall and had a beefy body.
For these and other reasons, it seemed to me that anyone could figure out she had been a man.
As I thought about it, I realized that her need to be true to herself must be stronger than any fears that people might react with disgust, ridicule or whatever.
I couldn't comprehend how such a need could be so strong.
A year or two later, I learned of another person who was transitioning. This was not at work, but at another organization I was involved with.
I only saw John at weekly meetings. I didn't know much about him, except that he was fairly quiet.
Now Johnna, she had a book called "True Selves," which she loaned out to help people learn about transsexualism.
I read the book. One comment I still remember is that, among friends and relatives of transgenders, the group that best accepts their change is their grandmothers.
That I could understand. Grandparents are known for unconditional love much more than parents are. Parents can be overly concerned that how their child turns out will reflect on them, and many still think that if their child is gay or transgender, they did something "wrong."
We all need acceptance.
As I see it, this works at three levels: accepting ourselves; being accepted by the family, lovers and friends we are close to; and being accepted generally in society.
I expect that transgenders struggle for acceptance at every level.
For the transitioning employee, it seemed to me that her need for self-acceptance outweighed any drop in social acceptance.
Yet I'd say that both she and Johnna were about 45 when they started transitioning. Was it because of social pressures that each put up with having a penis for decades?
Whether on an individual or a societal level, attitudes can change, but it takes communication and time to counter ignorance and fear, hatred and violence.
Gwen grew up in a time when society was becoming more accepting, or at least more tolerant, of transgender people and when there was more opportunity for transgenders to live as they wish.
But many people still reject, vilify and condemn them.
Gwen was playing with fire each time she hid her biological identity from a sexual partner.
At birth, Gwen was given a body she didn't want, yet even that was unfairly taken from her.
It is tragic that she should be murdered at age 17. It is equally tragic that she would be murdered as a result of being true to her heart.
In death, Gwen Araujo was silenced.
In multiple ways - including threat of or actual physical violence - voices throughout the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are figuratively silenced.
April 21 is the Day of Silence, when people are asked to "take a day-long vow of silence to recognize and protest the discrimination and harassment - in effect, the silencing - experienced by LGBT students and their allies," according to the Web site www.dayofsilence.org.
First held in 1996 at the University of Virginia, the annual Day of Silence has expanded to colleges, high schools and middle schools across the country.
The Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Allies at San Jose State University will have information about the event from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. today and Wednesday on Paseo de Cesar Chavez.
Ron Pangrac is the Spartan Daily copy editor.
"Reloading" usually appears every Friday.
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