#sylvia rivera

[troutreznor]

Sylvia Rivera during the filming of "The Transexual Menace" (1996)

photo by Mariette Pathy Allen [website] [instagram]

#mariette pathy allen #sylvia rivera #pride #trans pride #trans #transgender #queer #kitten #vintage photography #queer history #true trans soul rebel

[transrevolutionaries]

Sylvia Rivera at the 1983 Christopher Street Liberation march. Her banner features the S.T.A.R (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) Logo, and reads "And God Created He and She But He Also Created Me!"

#sylvia rivera #lgbt history #trans history #transgender #lgbt #stonewall

[lilacsupernova]

In recent years, I've seen the erasure of lesbian and gay activists. And all the work we did for gay liberation is credited to two people: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Even statues are planned to be elected in honor of them in New York. These two are now hailed for having organized the Stonewall Riot and the GLF [Gay Liberation Front] and even the historic gay occupation of Wernstein Hall at New York University in protest against the administration's homophobia. All of this is false. I know, because I and the women and men I worked with were there.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson are today widely celebrated as transgender people of color. However, Rivera identified as a transvestite male, not transgender. Malcolm, aka Marsha Johnson, was a self-proclaimed gay man, and drag queen, up until his death in 1992. Johnson deserves to be honored with respect and integrity, not rebranded as a 'trans-woman' postmortem. Johnson was probably transgender, though there was no such terminology at the time. Toward the end of his life he was considering raising funds to go abroad for what was then called a sex change surgery.

Nobody led the Stonewall Riots. It was a spontaneous uprising. Neither Rivera nor Johnson appeared on the scene until the riots were well underway. Neither Johnson nor Rivera attended any of the early meetings of GLF in July 1969. I was one of the founders, along with five other women and 13 men. Ellen Broidy and I were among those who called for the occupation of Wernstein Hall in September 1970. Johnson and Rivera were not present. They joined in after a group of us had already entered the building, and it was after the occupation that I first noticed them at GLF meetings. They were inspired by our Wernstein Hall action to start a new group, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).

This was important work they did and how they should be remembered. Through STAR, Rivera and Johnson labored on behalf of homeless street queens who, like themselves, often had to support themselves through prostitution, often strove to overcome drug addiction, and often found themselves in trouble with the law. They provided shelter and counseling, and visited those in prison. They were heroes in their own right. But the false legends have been widely promulgated in the international press, and give them credit for the work of hundreds of others, and never ever mention what they actually accomplished. The city of New York has not built any statues to any of us lesbians or any of the gay men who were involved in GLF. Just those two are the heroes. Stormé DeLarverie who is considered responsible for starting the first Stonewall Riot on June 28, 1969, after a crowd reacted when she was arrested by police, was a woman of color and and butch lesbian. She didn't get a statue either.

These smaller fabrications are perhaps not as dangerous as the ones that lead to war. But what is dangerous is that, by depicting one or two chosen individuals as great leaders and expunging the rest of us from public memory, they strip us all of the knowledge that we ordinary human beings have made history and can do so again.

– Martha Shelley, 'An Honest History' in Not Dead Yet: Feminism, passion and women's liberation – Renate Klein & Susan Hawthorne (eds.), (pp. 379-80).

#martha shelley #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #storme delarverie #lgb #pride #usa #herstory #pride month #trans

[callese]

#marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #pride was a riot #pride icons #pride history #lgbtqia #capitalist system

[annemarieyeretzian]

#queer activists #queer history #karl heinrich ulrichs #bayard rustin #harvey milk #audre lorde #marsha p. johnson #brenda howard #sylvia rivera #simon tseko nkoli #pride #lgbtqia+ #lgbtq+ #lgbtq #lesbian #bisexual #pansexual #trans #intersex #aromantic #asexual #infographic #art #digital art #photoshop #photoshop art #photoshop artist #artists on tumblr #artist on tumblr #annemarieyeretzian

[genderoutlaws]

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson posed for a photograph together at New York Pride | 1986

#op #photography #1980s #1986 #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #tgnc #l #bpq #tlb #pride

[sighing-is-a-song]

Happy Pride! Let’s get some things str8

Trans people had nothing to do with the first pride 😁

Black Butch Cis lesbian Stormé DeLarverie started threw the first punch that started the stonewall rebellion. I say rebellion and not riot because that is how Stormé herself referred to it:

“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn't no damn riot.”

Two cis gays and two cis lesbians, Craig Rodwell. Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, and Linda Rhodes, proposed Pride. And then Cis bisexual Brenda Howard organized it. She is even called “the mother of Pride.”

Furthermore Marsha P Johnson was NOT trans.

And Sylvia Rivera doesn’t like being called trans.

Erasing the accomplishments of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals to fit your narrative is not cute or “woke.” It’s disrespectful and downright homophobic. All of you spreading misinformation should be ashamed.

#pride #gay pride #bi pride #gay #lesbian #butch #butch lesbian #Fred sargeant #marsha p johnson #stonewall #lesbian erasure #bi erasure #historical revisionism #pride 2022 #trans #Transwomen #sylvia plath #stormé delarverie #trans rights #Sylvia Rivera

[turn-up-the-truth]

This Pride Month, we remember and acknowledge that Pride started as a protest in response to police harassment

This protest known as the stonewall riots was led by a Black trans woman and a Latina trans woman: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

#BlackTransLivesMatter

Image description: A black and white photo of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson standing together behind a police barrier. Johnson is holding an umbrella and Rivera has her fist raised in the air.

#sylvia rivera #marsha p johnson #queer pride #queer rights #queer #queer history #queer herstory #Black trans Lives Matter

[variousqueerthings]

feeling very keenly today the way that gender transgressors from the past have such larger-than-life personalities -- the way their disobedience and outlawism creates fantastic, heroic, eccentric revolutionaries and how that language plays into modern day mythologies without attaching itself to the people who created the language in the first place (ex. rebels against The System) and how many of these people came from poverty or even slavery and how many were sex workers at one time or another and how many were considered mad by their peers and how many of them existed along axes of oppression

#dr james barry #the mademoiselle d'eon #william dorsey swann #billy tipton #and more recently: #marsha p johnson #leslie feinberg #sylvia rivera #michael dillon #miss major #dora richter #toni ebel #gluck #etcetc

[z0mbie-gutzzz]

Id just like to take a second to thank Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera for the rights I have at the moment as a transgender queer person. Don't ever forget, congress didn't give your rights. Trans queer women of color did.

#marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #lgbtq history #lgbt #tranagender

[michaelmilkers]

marsha p johnson was definitively a trans woman and stating as such is not "transing history"

a common claim i see by transphobes is that marsha was not trans, she was a gay man who dressed in drag, and the claim that marsha was trans is an example of trans people encroaching on gay history and the gay rights movement. a common response i see from trans people and trans allies is that marsha could have been trans, or she could not have been, we just don't know. both of those ideas are false.

marsha was alive at a time when the language used by trans people is not the same as the language we use now. so people will claim that, since she never identified as transgender or sometimes used he/him pronouns or referred to herself as male, she wasn't trans. this is not true. marsha p. johnson was a person who identified as a woman, took estrogen, and planned on getting sex reassignment surgery. this is evidenced by things she herself said.

in a 1970 interview with members of STAR (street transvestites action revolutionaries), the first ever known recordings of marsha p. johnson and sylvia rivera, marsha details how she's "on her way" to sex reassignment surgery, and how she has "hormone treatments" and has breasts because of them:

in this same interview, sylvia rivera, who did identify as transgender later in life, details how both her and marsha resent being referred to as 'male' or 'he':

two years later, in an interview with allen young (begins page 261), marsha makes multiple statements about her identity.

she states that, when she does sex work, she rebukes people who told her that she wasn't a woman:

she again mentions having breasts because of estrogen and differentiates herself from transvestites who did drag solely as a performance:

i have seen people use this interview to support the claim that marsha wasn't trans because she describes being a transvestite as being a "very feminine looking boy". but literally directly after that quote she shares her plans to get sex reassignment surgery:

notice how, when describing transsexuals, marsha uses the exact same language she used to describe herself in the previous interview: "on [your/her] way" to a sex change. marsha considered herself a pre-operative transsexual woman.

i'm making this post because i genuinely can't believe this is still an argument people make. marsha was trans. period. end of story.

#marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #trans rights #trans history #queer history #gay history #transphobia

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Sylvia Rivera! (July 2, 1951)

A pioneering figure in the gay and trans liberation movement, Sylvia Rivera was born in New York City and became an orphan early in life after her mother died and her father abandoned the family. Rejected by her biological family, Rivera lived on the streets as a homeless youth and underage sex worker before being taken in by New York's drag queen community. She became active within that community and organized with the Gay Liberation Front in the wake of the Stonewall riot. A close friend of Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera worked with Johnson on a number of initiatives, such as helping to found Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and pushing for passage of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York State. She fought for inclusion of drag queens and trans people in the LGBT movement, despairing at the movement's assimilationist orientation at the turn of the century. She died in 2002 of complications from liver cancer.

"I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that's who I am."

#birthdays #lgbt history #sylvia rivera

[genderfcker]

just saw the insane take on that aphobic post that's traveling around that lesbians and bisexuals are the ones that built the queer community which is INSANE. anyone who's spent any time reading anything about stonewall and the queer community here in the us knows that its transwomen.

women like marsha p. johnson and sylvia rivera are the reason we can publicly call ourselves lgbtq+ today. and women like them truly understood community and intersectional feminism in a way terfs could only dream of.

on that note: any asexual or aromantic person is automatically queer, and fuck you if you think people like us are a burden on our community—because, in all honesty, it's the other way around.

#aphobia #transphobia #aromantic #asexual #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #transgender #trans #history #stonewall riots #its like how do u ever get to a point where u can just ignore history like that #do you not know ur roots

[elierlick]

Marsha P Johnson would have turned 78 years old last week. In 1973, she protested for Intro 475, which would have legally prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In an interview that April, she delivered one of her most iconic lines:

"How will this affect you at your job?"

"Darling, I don't have a job, I'm on welfare. I have no intention of getting a job as long as this country discriminates against homosexuals."

#marsha p johnson #lgbtq #transgneder history #sylvia rivera #new york city

[transexualpirate]

because i think this deserves it's own post: ive seen the rhetoric that because marsha never outright referred to herself as a trans woman (that i know of), lots of cis people tend to try to erase her identity or at least make it seem like she was a cis gay man, which if you've read anything about her at all you know she wasn't.

while labels do change and i cant find any record of marsha outright saying "I AM A TRANS WOMAN", she did refer to herself as a woman quite often like, for example, on rapping with a street revolutionary: an interview with marsha p. johnson when she literally straight up says "Lots of times they tell me, “You’re not a woman!” I say, “I don’t know what I am if I’m not a woman." (actual quote copy pasted DIRECTLY from the s.t.a.r. survival, revolt and queer antagonist book). can we say for sure that if marsha was alive to this day she'd identify as a trans woman? no. can we make a pretty fair assumption, considering she's definitely not cis and tended to call herself a woman? i think so.

and either way, even if she's not a trans woman, again, she is definitely not cis. she reportedly desired gender reaffirming surgery, back then more commonly referred to as sex change surgery. she presented femininely. she used exclusively she/her pronouns. she called herself a woman. she used feminine terms to refer to herself. if she was or wasn't a binary trans woman is pretty much meaningless at this point - marsha was absolutely trans, and so was sylvia rivera, and saying otherwise is just trans erasure, plain and simple.

don't pretend that trans people that are important to queer history are actually cis. there are cis people important to queer history. focus on them if you want. leave marsha and sylvia alone and respect their memory by respecting their identity.

⚠️do not pretend ex cop fred sargeant is a reliable source on my post or i will lose my shit⚠️

#mine #not to be taken seriously #personal #cw discourse #discourse #sylvia rivera #marsha p johnson #trans erasure #lgbt #queer history #star #s.t.a.r #trans #transgender #trans pride #transexual #fred Sargeant

[powerpuff2003]

#trans #trans history #trans women #queer history #lgbt history #sylvia rivera #t4t lesbian #t4t lesbians #trans lesbians #gender outlaw #gender outlaws #lgbt community #queer community #lesbian community #gay history