As many of us have celebrated and memorialized the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall, I think that it's appropriate to know what this event means for us, for our friends, our allies, and our communitites.  Here is an exploration of the memory (excerpted from my thesis):

When I examined Translate Gender’s community of memory, the historical event that was most often mentioned in interviews with members of Translate was the Stonewall Rebellion.  This foundational moment for both the gay and lesbian movement and the emerging gender movement is not just a moment of resistance that was co-opted by one group of oppressed people.  The participants in the Stonewall Rebellion were both gender non-conforming and queer people.  The momentum led to a gay and lesbian movement that was made up of queer and trans people.  The movement, however, came to focus on sexual oppression and marginalized gender oppression.  Today, the Stonewall Rebellion is not only a moment of resistance celebrated by the LGB(T) movement.  The gender movement also celebrates this moment of emergence and recognizes it as a historical memory of marginalization within the LGBT community.  The memory inhabits all of these different meanings simultaneously. 

What happened at Stonewall?

In the early hours of June 28, 1969 police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Manhattan. The patrons resisted the impending police harassment and assault – harassment and assault that many of the patrons had survived before.  London passionately recalls:

It was trans people of color f#*%ing revolting and that’s not really talked about even now. It’s not talked about, who f*#$ing started the Stonewall Rebellion [when] looking at that piece of history.

While the gay and lesbian movement views this event as the birth of public organizing, for many trans and gender non-conforming people, Stonewall was not fought by gay and lesbian gender-conforming people; it was spontaneous resistance by patrons at the bar, “particularly the African-American and Latina drag queens, kings, and transsexuals” (Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors).  Bartholomew describes Stonewall as “trans people saying, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore!’”. 

This was the beginning of a gender movement that is being reclaimed today by trans and gender non-conforming people. When Stonewall is spoken of by Translate Gender members, and others working against gender oppression, what is remembered is a moment of resistance started and led by trans and gender non-conforming people that was subsequently claimed by the gay and lesbian movement that emerged directly after the rebellion.  Translate is aware that when many LGB activists speak of Stonewall, its importance for trans and gender non-conforming people is not realized: “it’s not talked about”.

Why have trans people “played a leadership role in the birth of…lesbian and gay liberation”, as Leslie Feinberg uncovers in Trans Gender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman?   In the middle of the 20th century in the United States when state repression and societal oppression of gay and trans people was explicitly displayed through violence, harassment, and backed by the law, trans people were the visible and criminalized representations of perceived deviant sexuality because of their gender expression:

That was our crime: our gender expression didn’t match the one we were socially assigned at birth.  That’s what made us gender outlaws.  Some people used to say we “looked gay,” but unless we were holding hands with our lovers or walking out of a gay bar, it was not our sexual desire that made us visible – it was our gender expression. (Feinberg)

The gay and lesbian movement, and what many now call the LGB(T) movement, has had a profound impact on the gender movement.  For many, including members of Translate Gender, there is a shared history and an anger or distrust for being marginalized by the larger queer community.  LJ specifically identifies that the “LGB movement is the history of our movement” and that “we—for a long time as gender variant people, trans and gender non-conforming people—really rode on the backs of the LGB movement, [but] really what we’re realizing now is we’re not going to gain rights by riding on the backs of that movement. That’s not how any oppressed people gain their own rights.”

*Names of intervewees are psuedonyms.