Black Transgender Presence at Stonewall

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Happy Birthday, Marsha is a biopic that depicts the fantasy of events leading up to Stonewall. It uses trans actresses and does not whitewash the story. Many refer to this short biopic as "the REAL Stonewall movie"

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Eighth Post: Connection to Course

In Stryker’s Transgender Reader, Stryker mentions the presentation of transgender bodies in medical texts and outside of them. Here she mentions Marsha Johnson, and compares how here images, confrontational with eye contact and aware, and in stark contrast to how trans bodies are presented in medical texts, voyueristic and exploitative. Here this relates to how my topic focuses on the presentation of transgender and gender variant blakc activists during Stonewall because there is that misrepresentation that is similar based on misinformation and lack of representation.

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Sixth Post:Appropriation

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about diving deeper into the contributions of transgender/gender variant black youth is how it is celebrated today. With the follow of Stonewall, more gay clubs emerged, and it was there that the inception of drag, vougeing, other celebrations of gender difference came about. Somehow, these practices trickled out of the post Stonewall era gay clubs and fell into the hands of the appropriating white ciswoman monster herself, Madonna. In the eighties, Madonna stripped down all of the flavor and integrity of vogueing, all of the aspects that made it so fabulous because it was a celebration of difference, and packaged it to a mainstream white cisgender audience with her name on it.

Now she is heralded as the creator of this style of dance. Black trans youth contribute to pop culture endlessly and are still swept under the rug to this day. Take the movie Stonewall, which attempted to retell the events that transpired at Stonewall Inn. This recent film release contained no main characters of color, and the protagonist is a white gay male, quite far off from Marsha Johnson’s dark skinned black trans womanhood.

Why is it that society continues to try and push transgender people of color out of a culture that they invented? In the day and age of social media, youth are in constant conversation with one another, there is no hiding the truth of trans history anymore. Why it is that media still attempts to erase when there are less ways for this to be acceptable?

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Fifth Post: Black Trans Activist In-Depth

Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha Johnson was one of the pioneers of the LGBT movement. Her activism started as one of the original instigators of the Stonewall Riots. She was the cofounder of STAR, an organization that provided support in the form of shelter, clothes and food to other transgender women.

Johnson also worked as an activist and founder of the Gay Liberation Front, which fought for equal legislature for LGBTQ people. Johnson also was an activist during the AIDS epidemic and fought against the violence against poor queers by the gross inflation of medication for AIDS

Miss Major

Miss Major is a transgender woman activist that also originally instigated the Stonewall riots. She has been doing activist work for over four decade, focusing specifically on prison abolition and transgender womens rights.

Currently, she runs the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project, which focuses on fighting oppressive facets of society that affect transgender women of color.

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Fourth POst: Highlighting the Contributions of Black Trans Youth

The reason that Stonewall gained leverage is because of the police response to black transgender people (and transgender people of color in general). We can draw conclusions from here that the intersections of gender identity, race , and class are the reason that movements push forward. Single issue movements gain traction and are more mainstream because they broadcast to a wider audience and are catchier for those outside of oppressed groups to relate to. However, behind all of these movements, the catalysts for them are people who exist within more than one oppressed group.

For example, the main catalysts behind the Civil Rights Movement, a movement that fought for desegregation of blacks and whites, were the Womens Political Council. A unique experience of racialized sexism brought these women to action, yet they are heavily erased from history as the catalysts. This same pattern has been repeated with transgender black women even in present day media.

The youth during the Stonewall and post-Stonewall era flourished and created the revolution of influencing pop culture heavily that is still prevalent in todays media. The start of drag culture, the inception of gay clubs and styles of dancing, the language influences that still exists today (”slaaaay,” “yaaaaas mama,” “shade” “weeerk!”) are all pop culture norms that we indulge in every day without ever thanking the black trans youth of then and now for these pleasures.

In “A Transgender Historiography,”  Geeny Beemyn speaks to the amount of erasure that ze encounters in hir research on transgender and gender variant history. Of this, ze says “Future histories also need to be more racially inclusive and specifically examine the lives of trans people of color. As a reviewer for several LGBT journals, I am regularly asked to provide feedback on transgenderthemed manuscripts, and more often than not, these studies include few, if any, people of color. There is no excuse for this kind of “whitewashing” of transgender people today. At the same time, Black and Latin@ trans communities in the twentieth century have been understudied. While some researchers, most notably the historian George Chauncey, have discussed the rich tradition of drag balls in urban Black communities in the early and mid twentieth century, there has yet to be an extensive treatment of this culture.21 Nor has there been much in-depth scholarship on the contemporary ballroom culture among Black and Latin@ youth, beyond the pioneering work of the gender studies scholar Marlon Bailey on the Detroit ball scene.” (Beemyn 118) Here, Beemyn is one of the few scholars that has acknowledged the impact that black trans youth have had on pop culture

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Third Post: Who is being Erased?

When we discuss erasure on black transgender people, it is hard to shed light on those who have been erased because there has been such systemic erasure of black trans voices that we are becoming farther and father from a point where we can search for eyewitnesses who have the truth. Only truly well-versed gender diplomats can name more than five activists that were directly involved with Stonewall riots and trans liberation movements around that time period (mid to late 60′s and 70′s), simply because the information is not accessible.

When we talk about who is being erased, it is mainly the efforts of black transgender women who are being shut down. Marsha Johnson and Miss Major, two black transgender women who were original pioneers in the Stonewall riots, do not get the recognition for their efforts within queer and gender variant studies. Black transgender women arguably face some of the most violence based on their identity more so than other intersectional identity groups.

When we arrive at the crossroads of blackness and womanhood, there is a special kind of oppression that these women face based on their unique experiences with racism and sexism. There is a word for this: misogynoir. When we add another fork in the road that is transness, we get what is called transmisogynoir. The need for these specific terms highlight how awful it is for black transgender women

Marsha P Johnson was one of the original instigators at the Stonewall Riots and created an organization with Sylvia Rivera to provide resources for transgender women. Marsha was found dead in the Hudson River at 48 years old, and her death was ruled a suicide by police, although friends and family insisted that she was not suicidal. Her case was not reopened again until 2012, after lobbying by activists. The way that her case was handled very sadly mimics the pattern that exists today with black transgender women. The erasure of these women directly results in the violence. If no one is held accountable for it, how does the cycle end?

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Second Post: Silencing Black Trans Voices

The removal of black transgender people from the history of social movements and revolutions are all too common. Black transgender people have been the catalysts and active participants for several social movements (Civil Rights, Stonewall) yet when the history is retold, those names are not taught to us. They do not stick in our brains like Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman. Any school age child could tell you a basic synopsis of who Martin Luther King Jr. was and what he did that made him significant. Yet, why are we not aware of his advisor, Bayard Rustin, who was not a straight man and very open about that fact?

Within oppressed groups, there are several ways that the oppressed learn to protect themselves. The most common certainly being assimilation to the norm. When black transgender voices are silenced in order to make a movement sound more “respectable,” it is a subconscious effort to assimilate to the patriarchal cis- and heteronormative hegemony that are originally ideals forced upon blacks by Europeans during colonialism.

Within the “Encyclopedia of African American History” Paul Finkleman has a small section dedicated to gender variant and queer African American rights within his encyclopedia. He does not diminish the contribution of black transgender people, saying “black LGBT people - especially transgender people - played a vital role in the event that is often deemed the birth of the modern gay liberation movement - the Stonewall riots.” (Finkleman 444) He then goes to give a summary of the Stonewall riots and explain how post Stonewall, African American queers were able to contribute to movements more publicly, and goes to name several black cisgender queers.

Finkleman however does not list one transgender name within a section in an encyclopedia titled “Homosexuality and Transgenderism.” While this may seem like a passive slight, this subconscious behavior reveals so much about transgender erasure within history. There is access to the history of black trans peoples contributions to Stonewall and post-Stonewall revolutions, yet the lack of effort on an Encyclopedia authors’ part to do research further continues the cyclical erasure of black transgender people from history. This is in correlation to, I have no doubt, the devaluing and abuse of black transgender people, especially on an intra-community level violence.

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Black Gender Variant Youth during Stonewall

Studying the contributions that black transgender people have made to LGBTQ movements and legislature is relevant to transgender studies because it forces one to look at the intersectional struggles of trans folk and highlight how police brutality and harassment directly affects different facets of identity and how this abuse sparked a revolutionary movement