The Transfeminist Manifesto by Emi Koyama.
Street Trans Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was founded as a caucus within Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1971 to put forth trans demands in the gay liberation movement. The co-founder of STAR, Sylvia Rivera, was a Puerto Rican trans woman who led the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969 along with other trans of color. Yet gradually, the gay liberation movement was co-opted by white middle-class folks who are gender-conforming and became conservative. Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a New York based gay rights group was founded by ex-members of GLF who did not appreciate its radicalism and wanted to form a single-issued organization that only focused on reformist gay rights. GAA’s conservatism and transphobia showed when they dropped the trans demands while advocating citywide anti-discrimination rights in the 70s. They saw actions put on by STAR and Sylvia Rivera as too “dangerous,” “crazy,” and “extreme.”
Trans folks were not only attacked by mainstream gay rights groups but also in their own neighborhoods. In the West Village, a gentrified gay neighborhood, trans sex workers, who were mostly homeless and of color, were kicked out of the streets by white gay homeowners because they were “low-class, vulgar transvestites” not the usual entertaining drag queens. A real-estate-driven Quality of Life campaign led by the city continually pushed for the closure of clubs where trans folks hung out. Fighting for trans rights is thus a class issue. Rivera, who was homeless herself, saw the link and pushed STAR to organize a community space for homeless trans folks as well as fight for labor justice. They found a building for street gay kids, fed them and clothed them, while the government was cutting the healthcare, taking away food stamps, and putting more people with AIDS, youth, and women on the street. In Leslie Feinberg Interviews Sylvia Rivera, Rivera reiterates the importance of not only doing community work but also fighting against the government and the ruling class. STAR joined the mass demonstration with the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican youth group, against police repression in 1970. STAR also built alliances with the Housing Works Transgender Working Group and the New York Direct Action Nextwork Labor Group to form picket lines at a club where a trans dancer was dismissed from work. Fighting for trans rights is a class issue–to resist the rich property owners who push trans folks out of their neighborhoods, to confront the managers that try to fire trans workers, and to fight back against the state that cuts back healthcare.
Trans folks of color have faced disproportional economic oppression and extreme forms of violence. The challenge of queer and gender liberation requires building organizing space for trans and queer folks in the Left. As organizers, my questions for you all are:
1. Many trans folks have formed identity-based organizations to fight for trans rights predomoniantly on the level of non-profits–why is there a lack of trans presence in the Left? How have we taken trans liberation in our anti-patriarchal politics or how have we failed to do so? How can we constructively to change this?
2. Based on Emi Koyama’s article Transfeminist Manifesto, some feminists have criticized Male-to-Female and Female-to-Male trans folks of benefiting from male privileges. How is the privilege politics–basing people’s legitimacy to struggle on the assumed privileges they have in a racist, heterosexist, patriarchal, and gender-binary society–limited and reactionary to the movement?
3. Hormones and gender reassignment surgeries are expensive procedures. Recognizing that transition is also often not what many transfolk desire, for those who do, access to these processes then becomes a class issue. Our vision of transliberation then also needs to include the class distinctions within the trans community. How are ways we can conceptualize healthcare and other class-related issues that we are already fighting for that also include demands related specifically to transliberation?
4. Cg’s article Thoughts on Politics of the Disbility Rights Movement talks about the limits of addressing disability rights movement with the medical model and the social model. Similar to folks with disabilities, trans folks are often pathologized by the medical system and have to get the Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis to obtain hormones and surgeries. How can we apply the framework of disability rights movement to transliberation? How can we simultanously fight against the oppressive medical system, but also recognizing that many trans folks’ lives are entangled with medical treatments in a gender-binary society?
4 comments
Thanks for publishing this essay. It is excellent from start to finish.
As the months get closer to P.R.I.D.E month let us continue to print articles telling the real truth about the origins of our liberation movement.
There is still the tendency to push trans folks out the door in many quarters of the "gay" movement by the telling of revisionist history instead of our stories.
Numbers 1-4 are very important ideas to discuss and to put our thoughts into action.
Thanks again. Will link over to this from AFQOTP.
LOVE that freaking book. A junkie and/or cop stole my copy.
It is refreshing to see more voices from the trans community (re)visiting the topic of TransLiberation. A liberation movement that has amazing historical roots and revolutionaries, though as with the gay liberation movement migrated down the easier path of assimilation rather than continuing in the spirit of our truly revolutionary elders. QWB awhile back posted a similar piece by Alexander Lee and MC Ettinger @ LeftTurn.org titled The Radical Transgender Movement ~ Lessons for the Left.
Regarding the piece here, “Sylvia Rivera, transliberation and class struggle” it unfortunately only touches peripherally on the origins of the trans revolutionary movement as it rambles through historical facts and connections and ends with questions striving more towards reformist views than the original revolutionary views of the movement. In one respect the article praises Sylvia as a revolutionary though drifts into the more standard questions that have dominated our community for, now going on, decades.
To provide some deeper insight into the history of the trans movement I would strongly recommend Stephen Cohen’s book titled “The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York” where he provides probably one of the most in depth accountings of S.T.A.R. In addition to a general treatise on the gay liberation youth groups from 1969 till 1975. I think you will find this book spellbinding and finally a detailed and focused account of the revolutionary trans movement of the seventies and its many players. Additionally, though the trans community continually references Sylvia Rivera in regards to our lives and our movements of today, we cannot help but find that Sylvia is continually “white-washed” in these analyses and relationships. There is a great piece written by Jessi Gan published in Centro Journal titled “Still at the back of the bus: Sylvia Rivera’s struggle.” As the author notes “She (Sylvia) was being praised for becoming visible as transgender, while here racial and class visibility were being simultaneously concealed.” In analyzing current writings about Sylvia and the movement, the author notes “but the elision of intersectionality in the name of coalitional myth-making served to re-inscribe other myths.” And so my concern with the piece presented here, where focus is given to class though does not take a broad intersectional analysis into Trans Liberation.
Another must see documentary is Outrage ’69 which provides a very personal and serious analysis of the Gay and Trans movements of the early seventies. Some key clips from this documentary can be found here.
And of course who cannot forget the famous quote by Marsha P. Johnson in the article “Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary” in the book Out of the Closets, where Marsha states: “STAR was originally started by the president Sylvia Lee Rivera and Bubbles Rose Marie, and they asked me to come in as the vice-president. STAR is a very revolutionary group. We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.” I doubt if you would ever hear those words from many “Trans Liberationists” today! My reason for providing some of the above additional documents for reading is that if we are to take up this topic as a serious dialogue in the communities, we must first have a strong understanding and deeper analysis of our revolutionary roots.
In respect to the questions to other activists at the end of the article, I agree these are questions that are critiqued within the movement today, but are they simply reformist or truly liberating and revolutionary? Is the focus on surgery and equal access to all a statement towards true Trans Liberation or is it simply a reformist model of assimilating within the social norms of society. A model where a trans person must conscribe to a gender-binary system to be accepted not only by society but by themselves and their peers? Is our goal in Trans Liberation to find an egalitarian approach to the medicalization of anatomy, or is it to free our bodies and minds from the social norms that force one to believe that their existing bodies and minds are not truly revolutionary in a socially and religiously imposed binary system. I encourage folks to read a piece I wrote awhile back titled “The tyranny of the state and Trans Liberation.” I am also not convinced that there is a lack of trans presence on the left. In fact, having been at the US Social Forum and a number of other movement activities of the left, I have seen a strong presence of queer/trans youth taking a highly visible and prominent role in the movements. At the same time many have a very strong sense of intersectionality and its importance to movement building and revolutionary change.
At any rate, these are my quick thoughts on this piece
thank you so much for this.
Leave a Comment