Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Gwen Araujo Anniversary Memorial
Newark Memorial High School, Newark, California
October 4th, 2003

Hello, my name is Gwendolyn Ann Smith, and I am the founder of the
Remembering Our Dead Project and the Annual Transgender Day of
Remembrance. I am honored to be able to speak here tonight.
I know that to many of you here tonight, Gwen was more than a name that
one reads about in a newspaper, or a face you see on the television
screen. She was your friend, your daughter, your sister, your cousin.
She was a teenager who had good taste in clothing and liked music. The
seventeen-year-old who dreamed of being a make-up artist.
Yet like some here tonight, I never met Gwen Araujo. Nevertheless, her
life has touched me. Few days pass when she is not on my mind... and she
is always in my heart. She has renewed my own passion to see that no one
else will have to face such a death, and we can live in a safe,
accepting, and loving world.
Gwen's death is not an isolated incident. Since October of two thousand
and two, there have been twenty-nine other deaths at the hand of
anti-transgender violence. Fourteen of those we've lost have been in the
United States.
Fourteen deaths... that is more than one a month! That is unacceptible!
These are far more than numbers, these were human beings, like you or me,
killed for no better reason than the flawed opinions and ethics of their
murderers. These were sons and daughters, sisters and brothers. These
were friends and lovers, people whom others held dear.
Like Gwen, many of these people were young, like seventeen-year-old
Nireah Johnson and her friend, eighteen-year-old Brandie Coleman, who
were shot in the head while sitting in a parked SUV, or Nikki Nicholas, a
nineteen-year-old transgendered woman who was shot to death, then left to
die in an abandoned farmhouse in Michigan.
Most are people of color, like Nizah Morris who was discovered with a
blow to the head after a "courtesy ride" from police in Philadelphia, or
Jessica Mercado of New Haven, Connecticut, who was stabbed multiple
times, then burnt.
Many of you here may never of heard of them, but know that there are
people in all the cities these people died in, who feel the same pain,
the same anger, and the same sorrow that we may feel tonight over losing
their friends, their siblings, their cousins, their children.
People in Washington, D.C. are outraged over a series of anti-transgender
attacks in mid-August. Attacks that left two women, Bella Evangelista
and Emonie Spaulding, dead. Other murders in Texas, Iowa, Florida,
Alabama, Indiana... across the nation and the world, are leaving people
as upset as we are tonight.
I too am someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's friend, and
someone's lover. It pains me to think that I... or my own friends and
family... could be the next person we lose to this seemingly endless
string of anti-transgender violence.
Gwen's murder is a tragedy, another life cut short due to hatred and
prejudice, Yet we must be ever-mindful that anti-transgender violence did
not end with Gwen Araujo. Her death is like a wake up call, and it is up
to each of us to take up that call.
We must take with us the feelings we have tonight, and use them to help,
to heal, and to grow. Use them to educate others that the killing of our
friends, our siblings, and our children is never acceptable. Make a
world where there we will lose no more Gwen Araujos.
Thank you for your time.