Sylvia Rivera – “We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are.”

Most of us would like to think that society is gradually becoming more tolerant, so it is shocking to read that transphobic hate crime reports have quadrupled over the past five years in the UK. Crime statistics obtained by the BBC in October 2020 show that between the latest year - and the one before - there was an increase of 25%. We can’t simply shrug it off as being down to trans people feeling more comfortable in coming forward. Galop’s Transphobic Hate Crime Report 2020 found that although 4 out of 5 respondents had experienced a form of transphobic hate crime in the last twelve months, only 1 in 7 reported that experience to the police. With such high rates of physical, sexual, and verbal assaults, it is not surprising that more than half of respondents felt less able to leave their home. As one respondent put it:

“The fear is particularly prevalent when public figures – politicians, high profile newspaper columnists etc – demonise trans people in print or on air; it makes the fear more pronounced because you worry someone’s going to act on it.”

Recent research carried out by Professor Paul Baker of Lancaster University, on behalf of LGBTQ+ charity Mermaids, found that trans people are increasingly being written about in negative ways in the British press. They were described as having a propensity to be offended or be involved in conflicts or trouble in 586 cases in 2018-19 (compared to 8 times in 2012) and they were described in the context of being demanding or aggressive 334 times in 2018-19 (compared to 5 times in 2012). Alarmingly, transphobia is not the preserve of right-wing extremists, but can be found across the political spectrum. According to Juliet Jacques, there are two main types of British transphobia. The first rejects the idea that gender can be determined by more than purely biological traits and is found in publications aligned with the Conservative Party, such as The Spectator, The Times and The Telegraph. The second is from the TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) tradition and argues that transgender women’s requests for gender recognition are incompatible with cisgender* women’s rights to single-sex spaces. This type is often expressed on the British left, from the communist Morning Star to the liberal New Statesman and The Guardian.

I’ve always been a huge believer in Fannie Lou Hamer’s famous quote that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free”. So I find it hard to get my head around the idea that any feminist, or indeed any member of a group that has experienced discrimination, would not be supportive of other oppressed groups. As Martin Luther King put it: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” To those TERFs who argue trans women want access to women’s spaces to prey on them, I point out that they are not the perpetrators but the disproportionate victims of sexual violence. As to their argument that trans men are confused lesbians who have fallen victim to internalized misogyny and homophobia, it is so breathtakingly condescending I will not even waste my breath. I will save it instead for telling the story of the subject of my third blog post, Sylvia Rivera, an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist.

Sylvia was born in New York City in 1951, but was of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent. She was abandoned by her father early in life and became an orphan at three years old after her mother committed suicide. Sylvia was then raised by her Venezuelan grandmother, who disapproved of her effeminate behaviour, particularly after Sylvia began to wear makeup in fourth grade. As a result, Sylvia began living on the streets in 1961, just before her 11th birthday, and was forced to work as a child prostitute. She was taken in by the local community of drag queens, who gave her the name Sylvia. A turning point came when Sylvia’s path crossed with that of fellow activist Marsha Johnson in 1963. “She was like a mother to me,” Sylvia said of Marsha, who gave her a measure of stability and love she had never experienced before.

Sylvia and Marsha became key figures in the events that followed the police raid on the Greenwich Village gay bar the Stonewall Inn on 28 June 1969. In the early 1960s, the New York State Liquor Authority shut down establishments that served alcohol to known or suspected LGBT individuals, arguing that the mere gathering of homosexuals was disorderly. Thanks to activists’ efforts, these regulations were overturned in 1966, but publicly holding hands, kissing or dancing with someone of the same sex was still illegal, so police harassment of gay bars continued. When police raided Stonewall Inn on the morning of June 28, it came as a surprise because corrupt police would usually tip off Mafia-run bars before they occurred. Armed with a warrant, police officers entered the club, roughed up patrons, and, finding alcohol sold without a license, arrested 13 people, including employees and people violating the state’s gender-appropriate clothing statute (female officers would take suspected cross-dressing patrons into the bathroom to check their sex). Fed up with constant police harassment and social discrimination, angry patrons and local residents refused to disperse. Within minutes, a full-blown riot involving hundreds of people began. Having resisted arrest, Sylvia, Marsha and others led a series of uprisings in protest at the raid, which lasted for five more days.

The Stonewall Uprising was one of the major catalysts of the gay liberation movement and Sylvia became an active member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). In 1970, Sylvia and Marsha co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an organization committed to helping homeless transgender women. In addition to offering food, shelter, and safety, STAR fought for passage of the New York City Transgender Rights Bill and for a transgender-inclusive New York State Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act. As the GAA grew more conservative it started to ignore the rights of the transgender population. “When things started getting more mainstream, it was like, ‘We don’t need you no more,’” explained Rivera. She was extremely critical of gay and lesbian groups which focused on assimilation, and the marginalization of transgender people that resulted from it. Some gay and lesbian activists wanted to portray themselves as no different from their straight peers, and thought that argument was harder to make if Johnson showed up in plastic heels and with fruit in her hair. Things came to a head at the Pride March in 1973, when Rivera said she was repeatedly blocked from speaking. After grabbing the microphone, she delivered her passionate "Ya'll Better Quiet Down" speech, telling the booing crowd: “If it wasn’t for the drag queen, there would be no gay liberation movement. We’re the front-liners.”

After the speech, Sylvia attempted suicide, but Marsha found her and saved her life. Feeling betrayed by the movement she had fought so hard for, Sylvia disappeared from activism for the next 20 years. Sylvia was particularly angry that the Gay Rights Bill - which took 17 years to become New York law in 1986 — ultimately excluded the rights of the transgender community. "They have a little backroom deal without inviting Miss Sylvia and some of the other trans activists to this backroom deal with these politicians. The deal was, 'You take them out, we’ll pass the bill,'" Rivera explained at an LGBT talk in 2001. These "backroom deals" Sylvia was referring to were led by gay middle-class white men and lesbian feminists who didn't understand nor share her passion for marginalized groups within the gay community. But having experienced substance abuse, homelessness and incarceration herself, Sylvia focused on advocacy for those she believed the assimilationist sectors of the gay community was leaving behind. As someone who was a poor, trans person of colour and a former sex worker, Sylvia fought not only for LGBT rights but also racial, economic and criminal justice issues.

In the 1980s, AIDS devastated the gay and transgender community. Marsha herself was diagnosed with HIV in 1990, and her body was found floating in the Hudson River on July 6, 1992. Her death was quickly ruled a suicide, but after protests by her friends and supporters, Sylvia included, the cause was changed to an unexplained drowning. It wasn’t until after her friend’s death that Sylvia moved back to New York permanently. In the last five years of her life, Sylvia renewed her political activity, giving many speeches about the Stonewall Uprising and the necessity for transgender people to fight for their legacy at the forefront of the LGBT movement. In early 2001 she decided to resurrect STAR as an active political organization (now changing ‘Transvestite’ to the more recently coined term ‘Transgender,’ which at that time was understood to include all gender-nonconforming people). Sylvia’s own gender identity was complex and varied throughout her life. Shortly before her death she said:

“I'm tired of being labelled. 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.”

Sylvia died of liver cancer in 2002. The Village Voice eulogized her as “the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement.” In the last hours of her life, she urged gay leaders that had come to her bedside to be more inclusive. A monument dedicated to Sylvia and Marsha will be unveiled in New York this year. It will be the city’s first transgender monument – despite its history as the birthplace of the Pride movement. As Vogue points out, the posthumous tribute will be all the more poignant because both women spent much of their lives being ostracised because of their identity. Today, recognition is finally growing for Sylvia’s invaluable contributions to social justice and she is considered one of the pivotal figures who ensured the "T" in LGBTQ. But with the transgender community still very much under attack, the struggle continues with the next generation of activists she inspired.

* Cisgender (often abbreviated to simply cis) is a term for people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth

Bibliography

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Bradley, Cerys. “Transphobic Hate Crime Report 2020 – The scale and impact of transphobic violence, abuse and prejudice.” Galop. 2020. https://www.galop.org.uk/transphobic-hate-crime-report-2020/ [Accessed 5 February 2021]

Brockell, Gillian. “The transgender women at Stonewall were pushed out of the gay rights movement. Now they are getting a statue in New York.” The Washington Post. 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/06/12/transgender-women-heart-stonewall-riots-are-getting-statue-new-york/ [Accessed 5 February 2021]

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