Our Pathfinders

As young trans people start to come out many of them are not aware of those who came before them, who were our pathfinders who blazed the trail.

The Transgender Heroines Who Started a Revolution: Video Series Explores Activists' Hidden History – and a Possible Murder
People
By Blake Bakkila
February 1, 2016

For years, transgender voices have struggled to be heard. But for Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women who participated in the Stonewall Riots in 1969, keeping quiet was not an option.

Rhys Ernst, the Emmy-nominated co-producer of Transparent, and Focus Features, the film company behind The Danish Girl, teamed up to create a new documentary series, We've Been Around. (Alicia Vikander won an Oscar on Sunday for playing the wife of transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, now out on DVD and On Demand.)
[…]
Best friends Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were fighting for the "people who fell between the cracks of the gay and straight worlds," as the documentary says.

Johnson and Rivera were active in the gay rights movement and fought for more attention to the struggle of people who identified as transgender or non-gender conforming.

"I have been beaten," Rivera says to a crowd of gay rights activists in the video. "I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for gay liberation."

Together, they decided to start Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or S.T.A.R., which provided support, information and a community for the disadvantaged trans people in their area.

"We're tired of running," read the pamphlet for the group. "We intend to fight for our rights until we get them."

They were members of Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) but were forced out by the movement that they helped found because the organization only wanted gays and lesbians who could blend into society, Johnson and Rivera didn’t. They were outcasts who fought for those who lived on the fringe of society. They then founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or S.T.A.R. and then went on to found the S.T.A.R. House which has become Sylvia Rivera Law Project that carries on the tradition of their name sake.