Today’s Marsha’s and Sylvia’s are all around us, barely hanging in there.
By Orlando G. Bregman
(NOTE: This article was initially intended as a Facebook Note only but I felt the message was too important not to share it on Medium as well.)
I hope my fellow filmmakers, and the LGBTQ community in particular, had a good virtual Outfest these last couple of weeks, and are still coping with life in general beyond that. Aside from some of the transgender programming I haven’t really been able to focus on films, because life itself, particularly more Black people getting killed by the cops, is just too disturbing.
What’s unfortunately also extremely disturbing is the fact that the number of transgender people who have been murdered this year, most of them Black transgender women, get absolutely no coverage in the media. Even if most of these victims did not get killed directly by authorities their deaths are most often not properly investigated, and so no accountability for the murderers is demanded. And so this makes authorities, and even the news to an extent, complicit in letting murders go unsolved.
People in general are also not demanding enough direct accountability from the Florida police in the murder of Black transgender man Tony McDade.
In the meantime the transgender actresses from Pose have gotten snubbed by the Emmy’s again, while Billy Porter got nominated again. And so this is where things still stand for transgender people, particularly Black transgender women, in 2020.
A little while ago Frameline sent this link to my email for Marsha P. Johnson’s birthday on August 24. She would have been 75. The documentary Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson (2012) by Michael Kasino. It’s been up on YouTube, by Frameline Voices, for quite some time already, and so is always available for viewing. And it’s a must see for the footage of Marsha in her her own words.
It’s great to see her answer questions directly in a 1992 interview by director Michael Kasino, but I do feel that a lot of documentaries still haven’t come close to conveying the lived experience and person of Marsha P. Johnson. The short narrative film by transgender and gender nonconforming filmmakers Tourmaline and Saskia Wortzel ‘Happy Birthday, Marsha!’ from 2018 probably has come a lot closer, because it’s seen and understood from Marsha’s view, as a complete person. A feature film on Marsha P. Johnson is so overdue, and would be so worth it from these directors in particular.
Of course the particular time in history has a lot to do with it and information on what it is to be transgender was still really scarce in the 90s, and some of the questions in the documentary seem somewhat simplistic and poorly framed in hindsight. (Basic respect for another human being, and particularly your subject matter in a film, is the single most important thing.)
I’m not going to pick things apart here though, and this documentary is most definitely worth the watch.
(And I don’t mean to distract from the current protests and struggles of Black people in general neither, by in general I mean the mostly cisgender Black people who are affected by systemic racism and police brutality, but as a trans-masculine person myself I feel I have to highlight the plight of the transgender and gender nonconforming community within these larger struggles against oppression. Minorities who do not come in large numbers, like the transgender community, especially of color, are particularly vulnerable in making their voices heard and seeing their rights recognized.)
I’m bothered in general by the way people memorialize and sensationalize the lives and deaths of transgender and gender nonconforming people, without any real regard for someone’s actual lived experience, the hardships felt, the dreams of a person, the totally of an individual. It’s always just to serve a larger agenda.
It’s very telling that no description or depiction of Marsha P. Johnson by others, whether verbal accounts from people who knew her but were in a more privileged position than her, or from the generations after her and who evoke her name in the fight for equality, ever really stresses simply and truthfully that, besides being radical and revolutionary and fabulous and all, she was also just a poor Black transgender woman living in America, who probably risked her life every time she had to cash a welfare check or just walk down the street, and who was just creative and intelligent and compassionate and funny and angry too besides probably a whole bunch of other things.
Some of the most of the truly revolutionary transgender people today, and particularly Black transgender women, in Hollywood, are just people who have lived authentically as themselves and for a long time already, with or without medical or legal transitioning. And they’ve been spending most of their years homeless and unemployable, apart from sex work for some and maybe some minimal government assistance, and just hanging around basically the few places they can kind of go, a few fast-food places and 99c stores, and sometimes libraries, which are all closed because of the pandemic, and sleeping in tents with their little radios, because the government has never been willing to offer them anything close to a decent life, and they’ve always had to stay pretty close to the LGBT centers because that’s often the only bit of actual support they can get.
And it’s always been the same line politically, how “America’s not ready” for transgender people somehow, and the little media representation that does exist primarily focuses on a fortunate few, mostly younger, transgender people, but the rest just falls through the cracks. I know I’m living on basically nothing in this country still and have been dealing with many forms of governmental and societal abuse for decades now.
Then when Pride comes around the names Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera come up again. Always barely, but they’re mentioned, sporadically and ceremoniously and performative and as an annual tradition. And now finally some street signs and permanent murals are going up, and after three trans-women got attacked on Hollywood Blvd last week. A permanent installation has been put up on Hollywood and Highland, (starting point of Pride in 1970, and of the All Black Lives Matter march held last June 14.)
I mention Hollywood of course because I live here as a (bi-racial/ “racially ambiguous”) trans-masculine person, and basically visually gender nonconforming, besides being a filmmaker of course, and it has always been particularly painfully ironic to somehow think and hope that you are kind of safe and even accepted in a place as seemingly liberal as Hollywood, but of course, like anything here, it’s all just a big illusion.
The strangest and neediest assortment of people have traditionally strolled down these streets, and the Hollywood and Highland area has since long been populated with people in superhero costumes posing with tourists for tips, up until the pandemic anyway, but transgender people, dressing and behaving and looking the way we do, can still expect to be met with a bunch of hostility and harassment at any time, with the poorest mostly still wandering these same streets even now.
Of course this to me weirdly visual contradiction, of people dressing up as superheroes getting applauded, and gender nonconforming people dressing as ourselves getting attacked, makes perfect sense because Hollywood has ultimately lauded the same “family values” that the US itself has propagandized forever.
Just remember and recognize that today’s Marsha’s and Sylvia’s are all around us, barely hanging in there, and a whole lot are turning up dead in 2020 as well.
Those of you who might read this are probably progressive enough to know that transgender and gender nonconforming people are not confused or new or controversial or a curiosity or a fringe issue nor even a political identity, on its’ own anyway, and only in context to the fight for LGBTQ equality, which seems to be a full-time job though.
But transgender and gender nonconforming people also do not exist to satisfy anyone’s fashion sense or dance needs or general curiosity, and we are not some final extension of the LGBTQ cause to be allied with during Pride month only. And we’re not even slogans to profess your political correctness with neither, even though I appreciate all efforts.
I personally believe that what transgender and gender nonconforming people truly need over anything else is a genuine understanding from cis-gender people of our unique set of circumstances, particularly under systems of oppression.
If you are cis-gender, or if you feel yourself to be of a binary gender, (or not,) you should know that the cis-gender and binary identities are part of an enforced legal system, the gender binary system, not much different than the race system, and these systems co-exist. These systems are not based on scientific facts nor rational morals, although have certain roots in them, but have been perverted into a colonialist set of rules and policies to enslave certain people and keep others free.
These systems have excused themselves in the name of biology, and “natural law,” derived from biology, but biology alone, if one means by biology purely the physical body. But the purely physical body alone does not determine one’s humanity. And so biology alone is not destiny, our ability for critical thinking skills and compassion determine our humanity and our true destiny. Humans have from an evolutionary perspective willed themselves out of a purely animal-like existence by using the brain over anything, from inventing a way to make fire to cook meals to our complex abilities to communicate.
(People aren’t even biologically female or male only anyway, as most physically evident in inter-sex people. And hormones, just like the brain itself, are somehow not counted as being part of biology, and so hormonal conditions dismissed altogether, while many studies have proven links between transgenderism and prenatal hormones, and the brain and mind are somehow never recognized as being part of biology. Neuroscience begs to differ.)
But rights themselves are not based on “biology alone” but on a philosophical principle, which recognizes the right to life as the core principle from which all other rights derive. The right to life is not based on biology alone, it’s not based on the heartbeat of a fetus, but an adult’s rights over their body and mind. Not recognizing critical thinking abilities as being absolutely foundational to human rights is one the very reasons certain political agendas can rather easily block and strip away LGBTQ and women’s rights, (money and power are some of the other reasons,) but you can only truly acquire or claim equal rights by making a rational case for rights to begin with.
To be an ally to transgender and gender nonconforming people, and to break the rules and customs of the gender oppression that affects us all, we could start by simply not automatically assuming a person’s gender up front, and moreover not assume anyone to fulfill any gender roles or expectations at all. We should let go of the colonialist habit of dividing people into two strict and opposing genders, and with preconceived roles projected on them. We should just let people reveal their own sense of gender, organically, spontaneously in conversation and behavior, and however young they are, and simply treat people for the gender they feel and know themselves to be. And maybe just do some real basic homework to become somewhat knowledgable and not simply resort to overtly personal, invasive and inappropriate questions and comments, and we’d all be better off.
And it’s not about paying lip service to a few minorities when they’re in the room to only go back to stereotypical ways of thinking when they’re out of sight. Perpetuating rigid views on gender ultimately affects everyone negatively. Help to actively create an environment in which minorities are comfortable expressing their gender identity without fear of judgment and exclusion. And stop taking from the most marginalized, so as to fill your pockets and egos and look progressive while doing so.
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Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson
Directed by Michael Kasino, 2012, 55 min.
No Copyright Infringement Intended.
“Monday (August 24) is Marsha P. Johnson’s 75th birthday!
Celebrate with a free viewing of Michael Kasino’s Pay it No Mind- The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson on YouTube.
This 2012 documentary tells Marsha’s story in her own words, featuring exclusive interviews with the revolutionary trans activist, Stonewall instigator, Andy Warhol model, drag queen, prostitute, starving actress, and Saint.”
Frameline Voices — Pay it No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson
