Why You Need to Hear the Speech That Sylvia Rivera Wasn’t Allowed To Give

Sylvia Rivera was met with jeers and boos at one of the very first Pride Parades on this day in 1973. Here’s why that matters now.

On this day, June 24, in 1973, Sylvia Rivera—a founding mother of the queer and trans liberation movement—took to the stage for the fourth annual Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, as it was called back then. Now, we know it as Pride.

Despite the the parade supposedly honoring the movement she helped ignite, Rivera had to climb up onto the stage at Washington Square Park in New York City and take the mic by force. As she looked out onto the crowd of people gathering to honor the Stonewall Uprisings, just four years prior, members of the crowd erupted in hisses and boos.

She began: “I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them.”

This might be unfathomable to queer activists today, especially younger ones, for whom the names Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson borders on holy. But that wasn’t the case in 1973. Rivera and Johnson were women of color, were sex workers, were in and out of houselessness. They lived among the street queens routinely hauled off to prison for merely “walking while trans.” And there are important lessons we can and must take from them to make sense of the terror we face and feel today.

“I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail,” Rivera told the crowd. “I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way? What the fuck's wrong with you all?”

The most marginalized in the community have always been both the most likely agitators to fight for change, and least likely to reap its benefits.

So, this Pride Month, as corporate logos flicker in and out of rainbow hues and elected officials reveal themselves to be fair weather allies, there’s one particular group we should keep in our minds, hearts and activism: the incarcerated trans community.

Disparately targeted by state violence, cast aside in mainstream conversations about trans health, rights and life, and vulnerable to the most gut-wrenching whims of this administration, they challenge traditional paradigms about transgender rights. In a world that tells us we must be good enough, must pass enough, must conform enough to be worthy of freedom and liberty, it is profoundly radical—and necessary—to say, “These, too, are our people.”

We must not allow our government or our movement to consider those living on the margins expendable. If it becomes morally palatable to discard some of us, they will one day discard all of us. Being “one of the good ones” just won’t cut it, especially as more and more facets of trans life become criminalized—through health care bans, through “drag bans,” and through the criminalization efforts targeting the supportive teachers, doctors or parents of trans youth.

It's a terrifying truth, but it is also true that trans communities of color have been subjected to police violence for as long as there have been police. In other words: This battle is not new. We have come this way before, and for some, it has always been this way. The resistance did not start or end with Stonewall.

It’s also important to note that trans people are more likely to be incarcerated not because of some biological predisposition towards crime, but often because of systems outside of personal control—racism, sexism, and transphobia, entrenched in our systems of law and punishment and in our everyday lives.

When I think of Pride today, I think of Cece McDonald, imprisoned for defending herself against anti-trans attackers. I think of Miss Major, sentenced to five years over a robbery she probably would not have committed if her parents hadn’t disowned her as a teen, leaving her homeless. I think of her two subsequent stints in jail: “The first time for wearing makeup, and the second for entering a bar known for catering to ‘deviants,’” as per the archives of OUTWORDS.

I think of the many trans people sitting in prison today who are subjected to draconian anti-trans violence. In Florida, for example, medical staff (often male) routinely force trans women into a humiliating ritual—making them lift up their shirt, measuring their breasts, and determining whether they are “developed” enough to be legally entitled to a bra, as per The Marshall Project. Otherwise, they are forced to surrender all of their feminine clothing, such as underwear and any feminine toiletry items. Many are forced to shave their heads and face solitary confinement if they resist.

Trans men, too, experience this kind of senseless medical violence—such as an incarcerated trans man in New York subjected to an arbitrary “genital exam.” He was initially sent to solitary when he didn’t comply. He sued the city afterwards—and won a settlement, New York Focus reports.

The Constitution, as flawed a document as it is, still (in theory) prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.” Nonetheless, throwing a woman into a men’s prison, where she will likely experience rampant sexual violence, and/or forcibly detransitioning people en masse, is still a de facto form state-sanctioned punishment.

As for Sylvia Rivera—let us remember how she organized among the street queens and the queer kids without families to go home to. That the work was messy, and sometimes violent. That there was never a golden age of unity within the queer liberation movement, that there have always been partitions based on race, class and privilege. If we want to survive, we need to keep us safe—every last one of us.

Rivera continued her speech through the jeers. “I believe in the gay power,” she cried out. “I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not just men and women that belong to a white middle class white club [...] Revolution now!”

To learn more about how to help incarcerated trans people, you can go to the Anti-Violence Project, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, or the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) and donate.