Transgender women of color are pioneers of the LGBTQ-rights movement. Why are they still fighting for their lives? by BethEveNYC
The start of LGBTQ Pride Month came with an exciting announcement in New York City: Two pioneering transgender activists, vanguards of the gay-liberation movement, would be getting statues in Greenwich Village, immortalizing their vital roles in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion — which has its 50th anniversary this year and is widely considered to be the official start of the movement.
— Karamo Brown June 3, 2019 Thanks to leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and Harvey Milk, I have faith in the possibility of change and growth in this country. There is still more work to do, but let us take a moment and celebrate the gains we've made this #PrideMonth. Cooks spent June 1 eulogizing and then burying her dear friend, Michelle “Tameka” Washington, who was one of four black transgender women murdered, in cities across the country, within just 12 days of each other.
“We will not be erased!” yelled a fired-up speaker into a megaphone at one such demo — Keep Your Hands Off Trans Bodies in New York City, held on the Friday before Memorial Day.
“She would always say, ‘Mama, I’m willing to die for my transition, my respect and what I believe in,” Booker’s mother, Stephanie Houston, told the crowd, which included lots of local and national press — interest likely piqued by the fact that Booker had been viciously attacked in a parking lot in broad daylight, in a video snippet that had gone viral just a month before she was killed.
“World Pride should be about re-shifting resources to those who need it the most,” New York Transgender Advocacy Group executive director Kiara St. James, organizer of Keep Your Hands Off Trans Bodies, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “While cis[gender] queers will converge on NYC to celebrate Pride, the reason for having it was Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transwomen of color. Their ‘children’ are still dealing with lack of housing and healthcare and employment opportunities.
There is also this shocking statistic, cited often by the country’s largest LGBTQ non-profits : that the average life expectancy of transgender women of color is just 35 years old. “For what good it did my trans girls, it might as well have not happened,” Miss Major, a longtime transgender activist and veteran of the Stonewall rebellion, told HuffPost in 2018 of the legendary uprising.
But whether or not that sort of public acknowledgment or visibility translates into actual change is yet to be seen. Still others are skeptical, including transgender artist and activist Reina Gosset, aka Tourmaline, who was speaking in general about visibility when she told Teen Vogue in 2017, “While trans visibility is at an all-time high, with trans people increasingly represented in popular culture, violence against us has also never been higher.
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