Lesbian tennis champion Martina Navratilova, who has often disparaged transgender people, is at it again.
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X (formerly Twitter) user Zoë Rose Bryant had posted, “The modern gay rights movement would be nothing and nowhere without black trans women.” Navratilova commented, “I have no idea who you are, but you really should know more about the gay rights movement and its origins before stating these ridiculous lies as facts… there were no trans people back then. Try again with re-writing history.”
Actually, trans people have existed throughout history, although the term “transgender” is a fairly recent one. Some trans people who were involved in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement that began with the Stonewall uprising in 1969 referred to themselves as transvestites, a term that is out of favor today, and drag queens were sometimes conflated with trans people, even though not all drag queens are trans.
And trans folks definitely were involved in that movement. “At the forefront of the riots and the early movement were transgender and gender non-conforming women of color, like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy,” the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law noted in an online article posted in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.
The participants included “street kids, drag queens (later to be called trans), people of color, and the verging radical gay youth of the day,” longtime activist Mark Segal, who was at the uprising, wrote in a column published by The Advocatein 2023.
“Johnson, like many other transgender women, felt they had nothing to lose,” says a biography of Johnson posted by the National Women’s History Museum. “They were not only angered by the police raid but also the oppression and fear they experienced every day. In the wake of the raid, Johnson and Rivera led a series of protests.” Both are now deceased.
They also founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, said to be the world’s first trans organization, which assisted young LGBTQ+ people experiencing homelessness. Johnson was involved with the Gay Liberation Front and later ACT UP, while Rivera joined the Gay Activists Alliance in advocating for an LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination law in New York City, according to Smithsonian.
But Rivera, who was Latina as well as trans, “faced discrimination from established gay rights organizations like the GAA that were predominantly led by white men,” Smithsonian notes. “The GAA’s leadership often rejected the role transgender people — many of them people of color — played in Stonewall.”
The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which is named in her honor and assists queer and trans people with legal services and more, calls Rivera “a tireless advocate for all those who have been marginalized as the ‘gay rights’ movement has mainstreamed” in an online biography. “Sylvia fought hard against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York, and was a loud and persistent voice for the rights of people of color and low-income queers and trans people,” the bio continues.
A sign of the marginalization of trans people early in the movement came in 1973, when the New York City Pride March wouldn’t allow participants in drag. So Rivera and Johnson “marched ahead of the parade,” Smithsonian reports.
Griffin-Gracy, who is still active in the LGBTQ+ movement in her 80s, recalls spitting in a man’s face and being knocked out at Stonewall. “What stands out to me is that I got knocked out early because I heard from the girls that you need to piss the police off so that they would knock you out,” she told The Advocate’s Jeffrey Masters in 2021. “And so I was concerned about getting hurt, getting something broken, or being bashed where I couldn’t work anymore.”
Since then, she has worked for many AIDS service organizations and advocated for the rights of incarcerated trans women. She was the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Project, retiring in 2015. She addressed the LGBTQ+ Caucus at the Democratic National Convention last year and endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
“I’m not going back. I refuse to go back. And if [Donald Trump] thinks we’re going back, fuck him in his ass,” she told the caucus, to great applause.
Rivera, Johnson, and Griffin-Gracy are among the most famous trans people who were active in the early years of modern LGBTQ+ movement, but there were many others. The work of all of them easily refutes Navratilova’s comment.