Fourth Post: Highlighting the Contributions of Black Trans Youth during Stonewall
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
