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.