phensuximide:

Regarding Sylvia Rivera:

“And  there  is  testimony  that  some  guys  were  messing  with  her  and  they  threw  her  in  the  river.  The  police  couldn’t  prove  it.  So  I’m  still  stuck  in  the  middle.  When  I  heard  that  she  was  murdered,  I  couldn’t  understand  why  anybody would kill her. Marsha would give the blouse off her back if you asked for it. She would give you her last dollar. She would take off her shoes. I’ve seen her do all these things, so I couldn’t see someone killing her. I know there are crazy people out there. I know there are transphobic people out there. But it’s not  like  she  wasn’t  a  known  transperson.  She  was  loved  anywhere  she  went.  Marsha was a great woman.”

“I thought about having a sex change, but I decided not to. I feel comfortable being who I am. That final journey many of the trans women and trans men make is a big journey. It’s a big step and I applaud them, but I don’t think  I  could  ever  make  that  journey. Maybe  it  comes  of  my  prejudice  when  so  many  in  the  late  ‘60s  and  early  ‘70s  ran  up  to  the  chop  shop  up  at  Yonkers  General.  They  would  get  a  sex  change  and  a  month,  maybe  six  months,  later  they’d kill themselves because they weren’t ready. Maybe that made me change my  mind.  I  really  don’t  know,  but  I  always  like  to  be  an  individual.  In  the  beginning I decided that not getting the operation was because I wanted to keep the “baby’s arm.”

“People now want to call me a lesbian because I’m with Julia, and I say, “No. I’m just me. I’m not a lesbian.” I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am. I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that’s who I am.I will be 50 years old this coming Monday. I don’t need the operation to find my identity. I have found my niche, and I’m happy and content with it. I take my hormones. I’m living the way Sylvia wants to live. I’m not living in the straight world; I’m not living in the gay world; I’m just living in my own world with Julia and my friends.”

“The reason we, right now, as a trans community, don’t have all the rights they have is that we allowed them to speak for us for so many damn years, and we bought everything they said to us: “Oh, let us pass our bill, then we’ll come for you.”

“A lot of trans women are standing out on street corners and working  clubs.  And  many  of  them  are  highly  educated,  with  college  degrees.  Many of us have to survive by selling our bodies. If you can’t get a job, you have to do whatever it takes to live.”

“Transvestites are homosexual men and women who dress in clothes of the opposite sex. Male transvestites dress and live as women. Half sisters like myself  are  women  with  the  minds  of  women  trapped  in  male  bodies.  Female  transvestites dress and live as men. My half brothers are men with male minds trapped  in  female  bodies.  Transvestites  are  the  most  oppressed  people  in  the  homosexual  community.  My  half  sisters  and  brothers  are  being  raped  and  murdered by pigs, straights, and even sometimes by other uptight homosexuals who consider us the scum of the gay community. They do this because they are not liberated.”

“But  this  has  been  going  on  for  the  longest  time.  I  mean,  before  gay  liberation,  it  was  the  same  thing :  “drag  queens  over  there;  we’re  over  here.”  The world came tumbling down in 1969 and on the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall  movement,  of  the  Stonewall  riot,  the  transgender  community  was  silenced  because  of  a  radical  lesbian  named  Jean  O’Leary,  who  felt  that  the  transgender  community  was  offensive  to  women  because  we  liked  to  wear  makeup and we liked to wear miniskirts. Excuse me! It goes with the business that we’re in at that time! Because people fail to realize that - not trying to get off the story - everybody thinks that we want to be out on them street corners. No we do not. We don’t want to be out there sucking dick and getting fucked up the ass. But that’s the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable. I do not want to go to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man. I have been this way since before I left home and I have been on my own since the age of ten.”

“We were the visible ones, the trans community. And still and yet, if you notice where they keep pushing us every year, we’re further and further towards the back. I have yet to have the pleasure to march with my community, for the simple fact that I belong to the Stonewall Live Veterans group, I march in the front.”

Regarding Marsha P. Johnson:

“I  remember  when  STAR  was  first  formed  there  was  a  lot  of  discussion  about  the  special  oppression  that  transvestites  experience.  Can  you  say  something about that?

We  still  feel  oppression  by  other  gay  brothers.  Gay  sisters  don’t  think too bad of transvestites. Gay brothers do. I went to a dance at Gay Activist Alliance last week, and there was not even one gay brother that came over and said hello. They’d say hello, but they’d get away very quick. The  only  transvestites  they  were  very  friendly  with  were  the  ones  that  looked  freaky  in  drag,  like  freak  drag,  with  no  tits,  no  nothing.  Well,  I  can’t help but have tits, they’re mine. And those men weren’t too friendly at  all.  Once  in  a  while,  I  get  an  invitation  to  Daughters  of  Bilitis,  and  when I go there, they’re always warm. All the gay sisters come over and say, “Hello, we’re glad to see you,” and they start long conversations. But not the gay brothers. They’re not too friendly at all toward transvestites.

“When you hustle on 42nd Street, do they know you’re a transvestite, or do they think you’re a woman? Or does it depend?

“Some of them do and some of them don’t, because I tell them. I say, “It’s just like a grocery store; you either shop or you don’t shop.” 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.” They say, “Well, you’re not a woman.” They say “Let  me  see  your  cunt.”  I  say,  “Honey,  let  me  tell  you  something.”  I  say  “You can either take it or leave it,” because, see, when I go out to hustle I don’t particularly care whether I get a date or not. If they take me, they got  to  take  me  as  I  want  ‘em  to  take  me.  And  if  they  want  to  go  up  my  dress, I just charge them a little extra, and the price just goes up and up and up and up. And I always get all of my money in advance, that’s what a smart transvestite does. I don’t ever let them tell me, “I’ll pay you after the job is done.” I say I want it in advance. Because no woman gets paid after their job is done. If you’re smart, you get the money first.”

“What  about  the  term  “drag  queen?”  People  in  STAR  prefer  to  use  the  term “transvestite.” Can you explain the difference?

A  drag  queen  is  one  that  usually  goes  to  a  ball,  and  that’s  the  only  time  she  gets  dressed  up.  Transvestites  live  in  drag.  A  transsexual  spends most of her life in drag. I never come out of drag to go anywhere. Everywhere I go I get all dressed up. A transvestite is still like a boy, very manly  looking,  a  feminine  boy.  You  wear  drag  here  and  there.  When  you’re  a  transsexual,  you  have  hormone  treatments  and  you’re  on  your  way to a sex change, and you never come out of female clothes.

You’d  be  considered  a  pre-operative  transsexual  then?  You  don’t  know  when you’d be able to go through the sex change?

Oh,  most  likely  this  year.  I’m  planning  to  go  to  Sweden.  I’m  working very hard to go.”

All of this can be found here.

The only “evidence” of Marsha P. Johnson stating she’s a man and rejecting her planned transition is a poorly cited quote from an interview in a documentary that, from what I’ve seen, I don’t even think is actually in there. Marsha’s exact self-identity is an ambiguous thing and will probably remain a subject of debate, but to claim Sylvia Rivera isn’t a trans woman when she has explicitly used language inclusive of herself when referencing trans people? That none of them ever claimed womanhood when it’s clear that’s a load of tar when regarding the truth? What else could these statements possibly mean or imply?

Language evolves. Trans people back then referred to themselves differently, as, expressed by Sylvia Rivera changing STAR to mean “Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries” instead of “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries” because the latter term fell out of acceptable use. This really isn’t all that difficult to understand by any metric.

Of course I have to concede a point made by the author of this document, but even they recognize Marsha and Sylvia as women:

“Sylvia  Rivera  and  Marsha  P.  Johnson  were  not  respectable  queers,  nor were they poster-children for the modern image of “gay” or “transgender.” They were poor, gender-variant women of color, street-based sex workers, with confrontational,  revolutionary  politics  and,  in  contrast  to  the  often  abstract  and  traditionally  political  activists  of  Gay  Activists  Alliance,  focused  on  the  immediate concerns of the most oppressed gay populations: “street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time” (Sylvia Rivera  quoted  in  Feinberg ).  Within  the  predominantly  white,  non-gender-variant,  middle-class,  reformist  gay  liberation  movement,  Sylvia  and  Marsha  were often marginalized, both for their racial, gender, and class statuses, and for their no-compromise attitudes toward gay revolutionary struggle.”

“This  selective  history  has  also  been  reconfigured  and  replicated  by  the  burgeoning  transgender  movement.  The  activists  and  politicians  of  this  movement,  seeking  the  same  inclusion  of  transgender  individuals  into  white  capitalist society that the GAA assimilations sought in the 1970s, have created a  generalized  “transgender”  subject  in  the  narrative  of  Stonewall  and  the  gay  liberation  movement.  As  Jessi  Gan  points  out,  “the  claim  that  ‘transgender  people  were  at  Stonewall  too’  enacted  its  own  omissions  of  difference  and  hierarchy within the term ‘transgender’” and, as they celebrated Sylvia Rivera’s visibility as transgender, concealed her status as a broke woman of color.This  erasure  of  the  complexities  of  Sylvia  and  Marsha’s  lives  is  one  example  in  an  ongoing  white  supremacist,  colonialist  project  taken  up  by  transgender  activists,  who  wish  to  subsume  all  variations  from  Western  binary  gender  under the umbrella of “transgender,” regardless of the origins of the term or the self-understanding  of  gender-variant  individuals.  This  flattening  of  complex  experiences  also  allows  for  transgender  individuals  who  are  white,  middle  or  upper  class,  assimilationist,  or  institutionally  educated  to  appropriate  the  experiences  and  struggles  of  radical  gender-variant  people  of  color  as  part  of  a  grand  narrative  of  “transgender,”  thereby  separating  themselves  from  any  responsibility to engage and attack systems of oppression outside of the vague “transphobia.”  The  “transgender”  or  “genderqueer”  movements,  true  to  their  origins within academia and activism, remain dominated by – to utilize Sylvia’s characterization  of  the  gay  liberation  movement  at  the    1973  Liberation  Day  rally – “a white, middle-class, white club.”

But to take “oh they were actually gay men” out of ANY of this is a load of fucking willfully ignorant transmisogynist bullshit erasing the very words these women have spoken and written, especially when Sylvia Rivera herself has talked about being attacked by radical feminists:

“While  both  Sylvia  and  Marsha  noted  respectful treatment by lesbians situationally (see the interview with Marsha in this zine and Duberman’s Stonewall), the growing tide of radical feminism and lesbian  separatism  played  out  violently  against  STAR,  specifically  at  the  1973  Christopher  Street  Liberation  Day  rally  in  Washington  Square  Park.  Blocked  from  speaking  and  physically  attacked  by  lesbian  feminists  for  parodying  womanhood, Sylvia stormed onto the stage, grabbed the mic, and confronted the audience for its whiteness, class privilege, and lack of concern for prisoners. As Sylvia describes it: “I had to battle my way up on stage, and literally get 7beaten up and punched around by people I thought were my comrades, to get to that microphone. I got to the microphone and I said my piece.” The betrayal, led by lesbian-feminist Jean O’Leary, caused Sylvia to drop out of the movement for decades and attempt suicide.”

“But  this  has  been  going  on  for  the  longest  time.  I  mean,  before  gay  liberation,  it  was  the  same  thing :  “drag  queens  over  there;  we’re  over  here.”  The world came tumbling down in 1969 and on the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall  movement,  of  the  Stonewall  riot,  the  transgender  community  was  silenced  because  of  a  radical  lesbian  named  Jean  O’Leary,  who  felt  that  the  transgender  community  was  offensive  to  women  because  we  liked  to  wear  makeup and we liked to wear miniskirts. Excuse me! It goes with the business that we’re in at that time! Because people fail to realize that - not trying to get off the story - everybody thinks that we want to be out on them street corners. No we do not. We don’t want to be out there sucking dick and getting fucked up the ass. But that’s the only alternative that we have to survive because the laws do not give us the right to go and get a job the way we feel comfortable. I do not want to go to work looking like a man when I know I am not a man. I have been this way since before I left home and I have been on my own since the age of ten.

Anyway,   Jean   O’Leary   started   the   big   commotion   at   this   rally   [Christopher  Street  Liberation  Day,  1973].  It  was  the  year  that  Bette  Midler  performed  for  us.  I  was  supposed  to  be  a  featured  speaker  that  day.  But  being  that  the  women  felt  that  we  were  offensive,  the  drag  queens  Tiffany  and  Billy  were not allowed to perform. I had to fight my way up on that stage and literally, people that I called my comrades in the movement, literally beat the shit out of me.  That’s  where  it  all  began,  to  really  silence  us.  They  beat  me,  I  kicked  their  asses. I did get to speak, I got my points across. “

If you’re going to keep your head up your ass, at least be fucking quiet.