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| Sylvia Rivera (right) at the Christopher Street Liberation Day, Gay Pride Parade, NYC in 1973. |
By Lucy Sharp
This piece is part of a Women's History Month series of profiles and personal reflections—written by Legal Voice staff and volunteers—about women of color who have shaped history... or are on their way to doing so.
Sylvia Rivera was an activist fighting for racial and gender
equality, the rights of transgender people, incarcerated people, and sex
workers. While she had a very difficult life, she showed incredible dedication
to her communities.
Sylvia Rivera had a difficult childhood. Her birth father
abandoned her; her mother’s second husband was a drug dealer who showed little
interest in her. When she was three, her mother killed herself with poison, and
tried (unsuccessfully) to kill Sylvia along with her.
While she was assigned male at birth, she adopted a feminine
gender presentation from a young age. She was subjected to colorism by her Venezuelan grandmother who disliked Sylvia’s dark skin
that she inherited from her Puerto Rican father. Sylvia faced repeated verbal,
physical and sexual abuse from her family and at school due to a combination of
colorism, homophobia, and transphobia. This abuse eventually led her to run
away from home and drop out of school. In Sylvia’s words she “basically grew up
without love.”
At 10 she began working on the streets as a sex worker,
later moving to live on the streets with other queer and transgender sex
workers. In addition to abuse from her birth family, she faced racist,
homophobic, and transphobic discrimination in employment, which kept her having
to work as a sex worker. She simply couldn’t find a job that allowed her to
express herself. Unfortunately, she was eventually arrested and wound up in
jail for 90 days with men, who tried to rape her. As a preteen she attempted
suicide and wound up in a mental hospital for two months.
However, during her teen years Sylvia also found meaning in
participating in activism including on civil rights, the women’s movement, and
protesting war against Vietnam. At 17, Sylvia Rivera claims to have been involved
in the Stonewall riots, a rebellion against police and criminalization of queer
sexuality which served as a focal point for a significant part of the gay
rights movement.
Out of Stonewall formed many gay rights organizations
including the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which Sylvia Rivera began
attending. She soon found herself in conflict with other activists,
however. As one founding member of GAA
described: “the general membership is frightened of Sylvia and thinks she’s a
troublemaker. They’re frightened by the street people.” Syliva was also shunned
by many lesbians who accused her of “parodying womanhood.” Sylvia once said, “[P]eople
I called comrades in the movement, literally beat the shit out of me.”
Following her abuse and silencing by allies, Sylvia
attempted suicide and dropped out of the more mainstream gay rights movement.
She went on to co-found Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) whose
goal was to help kids living on the street by providing food, clothing, and housing
at a home known as STAR House. STAR also participated in demonstrations against
police abuses. While Sylvia attempted to get other organizations including the
GAA to help fund STAR’s efforts, they showed little interest. Instead Sylvia
and her friend Marsha P. Johnson funded the project through their sex work.
Unfortunately, STAR house was forced to close after an intermediary embezzled
months of rent and STAR was evicted.
Sylvia Rivera also worked on a campaign to enact a New York
City civil rights law that would protect queer and transgender people. She
again faced disappointment when politicians and queer rights activists made a
deal to remove the transgender protections from the final law. Sylvia, further
disillusioned with the movement dropped out, and spent years being homeless.
Her life temporarily stabilized when she developed stable
housing, a catering job and a relationship with her supportive transgender
partner, Julia Murray. However, in 1992, when her friend Marsha P. Johnson
died, she attempted suicide and returned to drug and alcohol addiction that had
plagued her much of her life. She also returned to activism, criticizing the
mainstream gay rights movement: “[A]fter all these years the trans community is
still at the back of the bus”. In 2002 she died of liver cancer.
There is a tendency to try to oversimplify Sylvia’s story
and make it simply about exclusion of the transgender community within the
larger queer community. But this approach buries systemic problems of racism,
poverty, severe trauma, and mistreatment of incarcerated people and sex workers
that plagued her life as well.
Recognizing the tendency to oversimplify, nonetheless, I
would offer a brief explanation of why I chose to write about her. There is a
tendency in movements for the movement to be accessed and dictated by the most
privileged within an oppressed group. Just as LGB people often exclude trans
people, white trans-women often exclude or ignore concerns of trans-women of
color. Often, the most marginalized or scarred people have their traumas buried
and left unseen or unaddressed.
Sylvia’s experiences with drug addiction, suicidality, sex
work, and incarceration marginalized her, and would leave her marginalized in
many activist spaces today. But in spite of her suffering, she did not let that
marginalization be the final word. She struggled with all of her heart to help
her community, and those like her. She made it to New York City Hall to
advocate for the trans-community, even if according to her, she needed to shoot
up heroin in the restroom to get through it. I deeply admire her perseverance
in the face of her pain, trauma, and oppression.
On a final note, discussing Sylvia Rivera as part of Woman’s
History month might seem a bit odd, to those who know her history. While Sylvia
Rivera is commonly labeled as an early transgender woman activist, it’s unclear
whether she would feel comfortable with this.
Sylvia Rivera was assigned male at birth, and presented with
a feminine gender expression that under many definitions would make her
transgender. However, she bristled at being labeled as transgender or a woman.
She tried hormone therapy, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for her. Like many
transfeminine people I know, she found the label of “woman” restrictive, as it
implied measurement against a cis-woman norm. Or as she put it: “I don’t want
to be a woman. Why? That means I can’t f*ck nobody up the ass. Two holes? No,
no, no. That ain’t going to get it.” Instead she eschewed labels altogether: “I
came to the conclusion that I don’t want to be a woman. I just want to be me. I
want to be Sylvia Rivera.”
So there is some irony in writing about Sylvia for Women’s
History month, when Sylvia rejected the label of “woman” for herself. It is not
to undermine or disregard that decision that I chose to do so. It is more that,
she spent so much of her life suffering, being scarred by abuse for simply
wanting to express herself as who she was, and help others do the same. I feel
like that struggle deserves to be honored, even if the label “woman” per se is
inaccurate. Maybe at some point in the future Woman’s History month will be
relabeled to be more inclusive of more non-binary identities, but I do not wish
to wait for that moment to honor Sylvia Rivera’s courage and sacrifice for her
community.
Lucy Sharp is Volunteer LGBTQ Legal & Policy Analyst for Legal Voice. Her research focuses on some of the issues that are most pressing for the transgender community, including health care, discrimination, restroom equality, and access to legal documentation accurately reflecting gender identities.
Photo of Sylvia Rivera by Leonard Fink. Featured with permission on OutHistory.com.
Additional sources:
Additional sources:
- Transgender History (2008), Susan Stryker
- Still at the Back of the Bus: Sylvia Rivera's Struggle (2007), Jessi Gan. From The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (2013).
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