rejectedprincesses:lesbonesbonesbones:rejectedprincesses:Marsha P. Johnson died on this day in 1992.
rejectedprincesses:lesbonesbonesbones:rejectedprincesses:Marsha P. Johnson died on this day in 1992. Co-founder of the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, she cheerfully cared for the less fortunate, earning her the moniker Saint Marsha. The police ruled her death a suicide - but in 2012 began re-investigating it as a homicide.He was awesome, for sure, but he was a gay man. Literally according to himself, in an interview days before his death. This is homophobic, gay erasure. He was not a woman and he did not call himself such.So a couple things:I didn’t specify her gender identity. (as a random cishet white dude on the internet, I shouldn’t be making those determinations in general.)Yes, she called herself a gay man.She also used female pronouns. In every single interview with one of her friends that I’ve ever seen (and I’ve watched hours of them), they used female pronouns for her. I would argue that if one truly seeks to honor Marsha, they should follow said examples and use female pronouns.The 1970s gay community also did its level best to exclude Marsha, Sylvia Rivera, and other people in STAR. They attempted to ban them from the 1978 New York Gay Pride Parade. Marsha and Sylvia ran to the front of the parade and unfurled a banner anyway. I would argue that it is a greater erasure to simply label Marsha a “gay man” and ignore her life’s reality, which included extreme discrimination from many in the gay community, who didn’t accept her as a gay man.(The gay community did evolve! By 1980 Marsha and Sylvia were invited to be at the front of the parade. This is all ancient history at this point, and not meant as a knock on the modern gay community.)Marsha was born in 1945. There wasn’t fine-grain gender terminology at a popular level during her coming of age – everything was lumped under “gay.” I am not making the argument that she would have identified differently if born in a different era (although that’s probably an argument someone could make). I am saying that it is very difficult to map modern gender definitions onto vintage gender declarations. Marsha was as complex a human being as any of us and should be represented as such. I see your categorization of her as reductionist.Calling that short paragraph homophobic is a willful misrepresentation. -- source link