Gwen Araujo

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Recommended: media portrayal of transgenders

Gwen’s community was not tolerable towards transexuals as she paid with her own life the ignorance of individuals, which resulted in transgender activist coming together from the nation to demonstrate support to Gwen’s visibility in the transgender community. The article Learning From the Death of Gwen Araujo? Transphobic Racial Subordination and Queer Latina Survival in the Twenty-First Century, by Linda Heidenreich discusses the gay panic and race issues involving the Araujo case. Due to the color of her skin, she did not get media attention, until the LGBT community enforced the legitimacy of her case as important as a white transgender victim. Heidenreich states, “Why did the death of this young blond man [Matthew Shepard] garner so much …show more content…

Where preferably the media probably view the case as another less Latino(a) in America let the family deal with that. Meanwhile, the white transgender victims receive compassion and respect, for being white. The power of transgender advocates have to expose injustices to their own people is instrumental since sometimes media neglects to celebrate their existence. For example, Heidenreich States, “It was also transgender activist who pushed to make Gwen’s murder public and to demand justice” (74). To point out, Gwen’s community was located where conventional values were greatly cherished surrounded by strict religion ideologies. So when the murder occurred the community preferred to have a quiet case and then forget about it the next day. However, For the LGBT the murder case was the moment to bring attention to a different ethnic group, Hispanics. In the Hispanic ethnic group most of the man are chauvinism and to some degree degrade homosexual men and especially transgender women. LGBT cease the case to serve as a medium to raise alertness of what transphobic individuals can accomplished and that any transgender man or woman can be murdered regardless of what race they are. In sum the support from LGBT movement gave Gwen’s family the platform to spread consciousness and empathy through out the

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