March 31st is Transgender Day of Visibility! In honor of TDOV, we are starting an online awareness campaign to celebrate transgender people. We will send out one all-campus email every day for a week. We encourage you to join in on social media with #TDOV and #MoreThanVisibility! The Facebook event can be found HERE<https://www.facebook.com/events/983060235121643/> and we would love it if you could share the posts to get the word out there! [cid:image001.jpg@01D189E0.E07DDE80] DAY 1: TRANS WOMEN OF COLOR STARTED THE QUEER MOVEMENT SYLVIA RIVERA (1951-2002) [cid:image002.jpg@01D189E0.E07DDE80] Sylvia Rivera was born and raised in New York City. She was Puerto Rican and Venezuelan. As an orphan, she was raised by her grandmother, who kicked her out onto the streets at age eleven for being trans. She was a sex worker and was taken in by the local community of drag queens. She was an activist throughout life, working in the Black Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war Vietnam movement, and the second-wave feminist movement. Sylvia co-founded S.T.A.R. with her close friend, Marsha P. Johnson. But at a 1973 gay liberation rally, the event leadership—now primarily white gay men who had pushed trans people out of the gay liberation movement—refused to allow Sylvia to speak. She forced her way onto the stage and gave the crowd this iconic speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiigzZCEtQ Sylvia was very discouraged by this event and by Marsha’s death, and retreated from activism for a while. In the last few years of her life, she restarted her activism. She spoke out against the erasure of drag queens from the new assimilationist gay rights agenda. She also spoke out against the gay movement’s willingness to drop trans issues from their agendas. She was banned from New York’s Gay & Lesbian Community Center in the nineties because she demanded that the Center take care of poor and homeless queer youth. MARSHA “PAY IT NO MIND” JOHNSON (1945-1992) [cid:image003.png@01D189E0.E07DDE80] Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson was one of New York City’s most famous drag queens. She was involved in the Stonewall Riots, and some have identified her as the person who threw the first brick at police. In the early 1970s, she co-founded S.T.A.R. with her close friend, Sylvia Rivera. She was active in the gay liberation movement. She became an AIDS activist with ACT UP in the 1980s. Marsha’s concept of her gender was ambiguous throughout her life and shifted at times. She considered gender-affirming surgery, which she ultimately rejected. Shortly after the 1992 Pride March, Marsha’s body was found in the Hudson River off the West Village Piers. Police ruled the death a suicide, despite the fact that she had been harassed in the area a short time before and that she was found with a suspicious head wound—suggesting that Marsha was the victim of anti-trans violence—and testimony that she was not suicidal. The NYPD re-opened the case in fall of 2012 as a possible homicide. STONEWALL RIOTS (28 June 1969) [cid:image004.jpg@01D189E0.E07DDE80] The Stonewall riots were a series of violent demonstrations by members of the Queer Community, led by trans sex workers of color(!) against a police raid that took place at the Stonewall Inn, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the Queer liberation movement and the modern fight for Queer rights in the United States. At the time, the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia. It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the Queer community: drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth. Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s, and they usually targeted transgender individuals for their non-normative gender expression. After the Stonewall riots, LGBTQIA+ individuals in New York City faced gender, race, class, and generational obstacles to becoming a cohesive community. To this day, trans voices have been silenced in the discussion of LGBTQIA+ rights. TDOV is currently run by Trans Student Educational Resources.<http://www.transstudent.org/tdov> TDOV began as a reaction to Transgender Day of Remembrance, aiming to create a day for empowerment and recognition instead of focusing solely on mourning. The 2016 theme is More Than Visibility: "This recognizes that while visibility is important, we must take direct action against transphobia around the world. Visibility is not enough alone to bring transgender liberation. Some people experience violence due to their visibility and some others don’t want to be visible. However, we can use visibility as a vital tool for transgender justice.” Disclaimer: The information in this email was not compiled by professional historians. Any errors are the fault of the writers, not the individuals described. If you have any comments or concerns, please email [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>.