Whipping Girl

IN 2002, TEENAGER GWEN ARAUJO was brutally murdered by four men who bludgeoned her to death because she was born male, because she was a transgender woman. But this is not another piece about the horrors of hate crimes or another desperate rant about violence, ignorance, or prejudice. No, this piece is about the myth of deception.

A year and a half after her death, three of Gwen’s murderers stood on trial together. The evidence demonstrated that they had plotted her murder a week in advance. And normally, premeditation ensures a first-degree murder sentence, but not in this case. The trial ended with a hung jury, a victory for the defense lawyers, who insisted that the murder was merely manslaughter because the defendants were somehow victims of Gwen’s “sexual deceit.” Two of the killers had been intimate with her, and their lawyers argued that when they later discovered that she had male genitals, they were driven to commit a “crime of passion.”¹

Deception. It’s the noose that the narcissistic drape around the necks of transgender women. Lesbian-feminist Janice Raymond used the word “deception” over and over again in The Transsexual Empire as a way to dismiss transsexual women’s femaleness, so that she could call them men and accuse them of transitioning in order to “penetrate ... women’s space” and “rape women’s bodies.”² And scientists who study animal mating behavior often use the word “deception” to explain why the males of many species engage in courtship rituals with feminine males—creatures the researchers dismiss as “female mimics” to deny any possibility that the masculine males willingly choose to partner with feminine males.³

Behind every accusation of deception lies an unchallenged assumption—in this case, that no male in his right mind could ever be attracted to someone who was feminine, yet physically male. This premise underlies Jay Leno’s infamous question to Hugh Grant: “What were you thinking?”⁴ It’s why Grant and fellow celebrity Eddie Murphy are still able to star in films for Disney while the tranny prostitutes they sought out are reduced to cinematic novelties: tasteless jokes in teen comedies, bad Lou Reed anecdotes in art films produced by Andy Warhol wannabes, or as examples of urban decay in police dramas set on sordid and seedy city streets.

Transgender women are portrayed as deceivers so that rabid heterosexuals can turn a blind eye to the transsexual porn ads that litter the back of men’s magazines like Hustler and Penthouse, so that mainstream moviegoers can watch The Crying Game and act surprised to find out that the woman who performs in the drag bar happens to have a penis. “Deception” is the scarlet letter that trannies are made to wear so that everybody else can claim innocence.

This is why the police, lawyers, and press who worked on the Gwen Araujo case ignored the multiple sources who insisted that Gwen’s killers knew she was transgender to begin with.⁵ It’s why nobody ever questioned how next-to-impossible it would be for two of Gwen’s killers to have had anal sex with her without ever coming across her genitals. Nobody was willing to even consider the possibility that Gwen’s murderers knowingly had sex with her. Why challenge our culture’s myopic view of male sexuality when it’s so easy to blame it all on one deceiving tranny? And why question the psychotic paranoia with which many men defend their masculinity when it’s so convenient to trash one young trans person’s gender identity? The truth is that the myth of transsexual deception is merely a ruse, a smoke screen designed to hide societal complicity in this tragedy.

Most people want to believe that Gwen’s murder was an isolated incident, an egregious act committed by a handful of young men who were provoked into doing the unthinkable. That way they need not confront the fact that half of the hung jury was more willing to identify with male homophobic hysteria than with an innocent transgender teenager. They need not examine how the news coverage and commentary, articles, editorials, and analyses invariably chose to view this crime through the murderers’ eyes, or through a grieving mother’s tears, for fear of what might happen if they dared to imagine themselves as Gwen, a young tranny they so desperately wanted to believe was nothing like them.

Everyone chose to tiptoe around the subject because they were too afraid to put themselves in Gwen Araujo’s shoes, if only for a moment, to ask what the world looked like from her view: To imagine how frustrated you might be if you were unable to explore your own sexuality without having other people turn your body into a lightning rod for their own insecurities. To imagine how unjust it would feel to be dismissed as a fraud despite being the only nineteen-year-old in your known universe with the guts to truly be yourself. To imagine how frail masculinity would seem to you if you had seen a pack of young men in their twenties exude pure fear over one feminine transgender teen. To imagine how flat-out foolish those boys must have seemed as they confronted you with the question, “Are you a woman or a man?” And to picture the blank stares on their faces when you replied, “Isn’t it obvious?” To imagine how hollow accusations of deception would sound to you if you understood that the real question that needed to be asked was “Who’s deceiving whom?”

As I said, this piece is not about hate crimes, violence, ignorance, or prejudice. It’s about self-deception. It’s about the assumptions that people like me live with on a daily basis. Because like Gwen, I was born male. I am a transgender woman. And if we were to meet and if I didn’t immediately share that information with you, would that be an act of deception? Could you accuse me of telling a lie if you were to see what you wanted to see with your own eyes and I decided to simply keep quiet? And if I were to presume things about you that were not true, could I accuse you of misleading me too? Or would such careless accusations of deception merely be expressions of callous pride, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge our own mistaken assumptions?

The untold story behind Gwen’s much-publicized death is that she is only the tip of the iceberg. Gwen’s murder took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there are thousands of people who identify as transgender. Keep that in mind every time you walk down the street or flirt with a stranger. A certain percentage of the people you meet either appear to be a sex different from the one they were assigned at birth or identify as a gender different from the one you assume they are. And if this makes you feel uneasy, it is only because you are choosing not to live in reality.

It is time to move beyond pseudoliberal sound bites about how we all need to accept people who differ from us. Mere tolerance is insufficient. If we are to learn any lesson from Gwen Araujo’s death, it’s that we each need to take personal responsibility for our own presumptions. We should stop buying into the myth of deception, because the truth is that every day, each of us is guilty of committing countless acts of assumption.