Honoring the Legacy of Sylvia Rivera

On June 27, 1969, Sylvia Rivera, a 17-year-old drag queen from the Bronx, led the charge at the Stonewall Riots.  At approximately 5:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, February 19, 2002 this long-time queer warrior, Miss Sylvia Rivera, died in St. Vincent's Hospital after a strong fight with liver cancer.

Acronyms -- The "T" in GLBT (Transgender/ Transsexual and FTM)

Sylvia Rivera was the famous transgendered woman who was at the Stonewall Inn, New York City, on the night of 27th of June, 1969, the night that a riot at the bar, touched off the open radicalization of the Gay Liberation Movement. She literally led the charge, fought back against police harassment directed at the most visible members of the community.

In the next few years she was active in the Gay Liberation Front, actively participating in the growing Gay Rights Movement, until the gay men betrayed the transgender community and she was personally trashed by the lesbian community in the first year of the Backlash in 1973.

In 1970, less than a year after the infamous Stonewall Riots, Sylvia Rivera joined forces with another Stonewall veteran, the late Marsha P. Johnson, to form the group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Later renamed Street Transgender Action Revolutions, STAR and Sylvia Rivera worked tirelessly for the civil rights of transgender and other queer people.

Across the country and around the globe, she was frequently called on to address audiences of rising activists and advocates. Sylvia's firebrand demeanor was world-renowned and instrumental in galvanizing the transgender community to fight to further the cause of justice for all.

Rivera was involved in the struggle for human rights until the moment of her death.

Last year, Rivera resurrected STAR in response to the high-profile murder of transsexual prostitute, Amanda Milan. Ms. Rivera herself was the spearhead of both the vigil immediately following Milan's death, and another awareness vigil before the beginning of the murder trial of Milan's killers.

Recently, just out of the hospital, Sylvia participated in the lobbying effort to include gender identity in New York State's pending SONDA (Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act). She challenged the lead organization, ESPA (Empire State Pride Agenda) to push for revised wording to expand the coverage to transgenders.

Rivera met with the leadership of the Empire State Pride Agenda in her hospital room just hours before her death, presenting the issues of concern to the community and negotiating for greater support from ESPA. She left the national GLBT community as she had begun: a true and outspoken activist who was totally committed, and who never knew the word "quit."

Now with new acronyms: FTM (Female to Male) and MTF (Male to Female), one cannot help but honor and celebrate the life of Sylvia Rivera for her activism to include transgender/transsexual issues in the gay and lesbian movement.   

In her words:  "Today I'm a 38-year-old drag queen. I can keep my long hair, I can pluck my eyebrows, and I can work wherever the hell I want. And I'm not going to change for anybody. If I changed, then I feel that I'm losing what 1969 brought into my life, and that was to be totally free."

Resources For FTMs (Female To Male)

FTM stands for Female-to-Male. This site is the internet contact point for the largest, longest-running educational organization serving FTM transgendered people and transsexual men.  http://www.ftm-intl.org/

We are a diverse group. We come from different backgrounds, including every imaginable sexual orientation, and are multicultural. We range in age from our teens to our 70s and include persons who are just beginning to examine gender issues as well as persons who have been dealing with them for many years.

We are here to help - whether in the form of providing information, or through our newsletter and other publications, through support from volunteers who are willing to help if you need someone to talk to, or through our list of online mailing lists and links, and also through our monthly meetings and special events.

Transster.com is the name of this web site. Transster is a repository for images of FTM gender reassignment surgery results.

At Transster, FTM transsexuals can upload pictures of their own surgical results, as well as search and sort through images other transmen have submitted.

You MUST create a login ID in order to view and add GRS surgery pictures. Without a login this site is useless.

Transster is meant only for transmen and their SOFFAs.  If anyone is interested in hosting a similar site for transwomen the code is available for free, or check out Anne Lawrence's site.

This Charming Man: The charismatic life and horrific death of Brandon Teena

On New Year's Eve, 1993, two young men drove to a farmhouse in rural Nebraska and killed the three people inside. Their victims were the farmhouse's residents, a 24-year-old single mother and a 22-year-old man, and a 21-year-old drifter who was taking refuge at the house following recent trouble in nearby Falls City.

The drifter was a slight, muscular, short-haired woman named Teena Brandon. The two men who shot her, Tom Nissen and John Lotter, had known her as a slight, muscular, affable young man named Brandon Teena until a week earlier, when, upon discovering her true gender, they drove her out to the Nebraska countryside and raped her in the back of their car on Christmas Eve. When Brandon pressed charges, the two men, both ex-convicts, decided to kill her.
 

Jamison "James" Green is the former president of FTM International, Inc. the world's largest information and networking group for female-to-male transgendered people and transsexual men. He has served as a role model and inspiration for hundreds of new men, and he has also earned the respect and admiration of gender-conscious people everywhere because of his refusal to accept shame and discrimination as a condition of life for gender-different people. His public presentations have a powerful effect on audiences everywhere: his ability to conceptualize and express his understanding of gender contributes to greater tolerance and acceptance of diversity and he is in the forefront of the movement to redefine gender to be less constraining for everyone. He is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and a consulting editor of the FTM Newsletter. He created FTM International, Inc. in 1994 out of the San Francisco FTM support group that he led since March 1991, and he left the organization administration on August 1, 1999 to make room for other leadership and have more time for his creative work.

Source:  Sound Portraits.org
http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/remembering_stonewall/transcript.php3
National Transgender Advocacy Coalition
http://www.ntac.org/pr/020219sylvia.html