Today it is a gay man who started Mattachine Society one of the first gay civil rights networks. But there were others before him, including trans networks.
One of the early trans networks was The Society for Equality in Dress in 1955 which was founded by Virginia Prince who later founded Hose & Heel Club in 1962 and Conversion Our Goal in 1967. (Most of this is from Susan Stryker’s Transgender History. Berkley CA. Seal Press. 2008)
There were also a number of trans people who started corresponding Virginia Price and Louise Lawrence, they develop an extensive mail list including many of the doctors and important figures at that time, such as; Dr. Harry Benjamin, Dr Alfred Kinsley, and Pat Brown the then Attorney General of California.
We think of the Stonewall Uprising as the first protest for LGBTQ+ human rights but it wasn’t, we were out their protesting long before Stonewall (Stonewall just got the press… the other protests were hardly mentioned in the news.)
In 1959 out in California there was the Cooper’s Donuts Uprising, the first known uprising, in 1965 Dewey’s Lunch Counter Protest, then a year latter there was the Compton Cafeteria Uprising in San Francisco.
What did all these uprisings and protest have in common? It was all the “street queens” who said enough is enough and fought back. Just like Stonewall the police raided these hangouts for the “street queens” checking to see if they were wearing at least 3 items of male clothing.
How Dressing in Drag Was Labeled a Crime in the 20th CenturyAnd then came Stonewall.
In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, police arrested LGBTQ people based on an informal "three-article" rule. The Stonewall Riots helped turn the tide against these arrests.
History.com
By Hugh Ryan
June 25, 2019
[...]
In LGBTQ circles around the country, this was known as the three-article rule—or the three-piece law. It was referenced everywhere—including in reports about arrests in Greenwich Village in the weeks and months leading up to the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
The problem is, the law technically never existed. Instead, accounts suggest that police generally used old, often unrelated laws to target LGBT people throughout the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
Masquerade Laws Revived to Target LGBTQ
Laws criminalizing cross-dressing spread like wildfire around the United States in the mid-19th century. New York’s, dating back to 1845, was one of the oldest. It declared it a crime to have your “face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or [be] otherwise disguised… [while] in a road or public highway.”
[…]
In Brooklyn in 1913, for instance, a person who we would today call a transgender man was arrested for “masquerading in men’s clothes,” smoking and drinking in a bar. When the magistrate noted that the state’s masquerade law was intended only to criminalize costumed dress used as a cover for another crime, the police were forced to let the man go. However, they promptly re-arrested him, charged him with “associating with idle and vicious persons,” and found a new magistrate to try the case.
We cannot let the GAY INC. steal our history, Stonewall was NOT a gay event... it was a LGBTQ+ uprising. Lesbians, Queers, and Trans people lead the way. As Leslie Fienberg wrote in Worker's World...
“Sylvia Rivera characterizes the Stonewall Inn as ‘a white male bar for middle-class males to pick up young boys of different races.’”
That...
“Only people dressed in clothes of a different gender, people without IDs, and employees of the bar would be arrested. Everyone else would be released.”
I have been doing a workshop at the True Color’s conference on trans history and my references for thee workshop are…
Feinberg, L. (1994). Transgender Warrior. Boston, MA. Beacon Press.
Feinberg, L. (1998). 'I'm glad I was in the Stonewall riot'. Worker’s World. Retrieved August 1, 2009. From http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sylvia0702.php
Gan, J. (2007, Spring). Still at the back of the bus: Sylvia Rivera's struggle. Centro Journal, 19(1), 124-139. Retrieved July 1, 2009, from LGBT Life with Full Text database.
Green J. (2004, January). Becoming a Visible Man. Nashville, TN. Vanderbilt University Press.
D'Emilio, J., Turner, W., & Vaid, U.(2000) FACING DISCRIMINATION, ORGANIZING FOR FREEDOM:THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY. CREATING CHANGE: PUBLIC POLICY, AND CIVIL RIGHTS, Retrieved Sept. 24, 2009, from http://www.transgenderlegal.com/chpt22.htm
King, D., Ekins, R., (2000), Pioneers of Transgendering: The Life and Work of Virginia Prince, GENDYS 2k, The Sixth International Gender Dysphoria Conference, Manchester England.
MacKenzie, G. (1994). Transgender Nation. Bowling Green OH. Popular Press.
Meyerowitz, J. (2002). How Sex Changed. Boston, MA. Harvard Press.
Roberts, M., (2007, October 18). The 1965 Dewey's Lunch Counter Sit-In. TransGriot, Retrieved September 22, 2009, from http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2007/10/1965-deweys-lunch-counter-sit-it.html
Roberts, M., (2012, March). A Look at African-American Trans Trailblazers, Ebony. Retrieved March 10, 2012, from http://www.ebony.com/news-views/trans-trailblazers
Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender History. Berkley CA. Seal Press.
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