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trans-advice · 3 years

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Excerpt from “Transgender History” (2017) by Susan Stryker (“Chapter 3: Trans Liberation”)

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Stonewall:

Meanwhile, across the continent [from San Francisco, California, USA], another important center of transgender activism was taking shape in New York City [New York, USA], where, not coincidentally, Harry Benjamin maintained his primary medical practice. In 1968, Mario Martino, a female-to-male transsexual, founded Labyrinth, the first organization in the United States devoted specifically to the needs of transgender men. Martino and his wife, who both worked in the health care field, helped other transsexual men navigate their way through the often-confusing maze of transgender-oriented medical services just then beginning to emerge, which (despite being funded primarily by Reed Erickson) were geared more toward the needs of transgenderwomen than transgender men. Labyrinth was not a political organization but rather one that aimed to help individuals make the often-difficult transition from one social gender to another.

Far overshadowing the quiet work of Martino’s Labyrinth Foundation, however, were the dramatic events of June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The “Stonewall Riots” have been mythologized as the origin of the gay liberation movement, and there is a great deal of truth in that characterization, but—as we have seen—gay, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people had been engaging in militant protest and collective actions against social oppression for at least a decade by that time. Stonewall stands out as the biggest and most consequential example of a kind of event that was becoming increasingly common, rather than as a unique occurrence. By 1969, as a result of many years of social upheaval and political agitation, large numbers of people who were socially marginalized because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, especially younger people who were part of the Baby Boomer generation, were drawn to the idea of “gay revolution” and were primed for any event that would set such a movement off. The Stonewall Riots provided that very spark, and they inspired the formation of Gay Liberation Front groups in big cities, progressive towns, and college campuses all across the United States. Ever since the summer of 1969, various groups of people who identify with the people who participated in the rioting have argued about what actually happened, what the riot’s underlying causes were, who participated in it, and what the movements that point back to Stonewall as an important part of their own history have in common with one another.

Although Greenwich Village was not as economically down-and-out as San Francisco’s Tenderloin, it was nevertheless a part of the city that appealed to the same sorts of people who resisted at Cooper Do-Nut, Dewey’s, and Compton’s Cafeteria: drag queens, hustlers, gender nonconformists of many varieties, gay men, lesbians, and countercultural types who simply “dug the scene.” The Stonewall Inn was a small, shabby, Mafia-run bar (as were many of the gay-oriented bars in New York back in the days when being gay or cross-dressing were crimes). It drew a racially mixed crowd and was popular mainly for its location on Christopher Street near Sheridan Square, where many gay men “cruised” for casual sex, and because it featured go-go boys, cheap beer, a good jukebox, and a crowded dance floor. Then as now, there was a lively street scene in the bar’s vicinity, one that drew young and racially mixed queer folk from through the region most weekend nights. Police raids were relatively frequent (usually when the bar was slow to make its payoffs to corrupt cops) and relatively routine and uneventful. Once the bribes were sorted out, the bar would reopen, often on the same night. But in the muggy, early morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, events departed from the familiar script when the squad cars pulled up outside the Stonewall Inn.

[Source text Inserts “Sidebar: Radical Transsexual” here]

A large crowd of people gathered on the street as police began arresting workers and patrons and escorting them out of the bar and into the waiting police wagons. Some people in the crowd started throwing coins at the police officers, taunting them for taking “payola.” Eyewitness accounts of what happened next differ in their particulars, but some witnesses claim a transmasculine person resisted police attempts to put them in the police wagon, while others noted that African American and Puerto Rican members of the crowd—many of them street queens, feminine gay men, transgender women, or gender-nonconforming youth—grew increasingly angry as they watched their “sisters” being arrested and escalated the level of opposition to the police. Both stories might well be true. Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman who came to play an important role in subsequent transgender political history, long maintained that, after she was jabbed by a police baton, she threw the beer bottle that tipped the crowd’s mood from mockery to collective resistance. In any case, the targeting of gender-nonconforming people, people of color, and poor people during a police action fits the usual patterns of police behavior in such situations.

Bottles, rocks, and other heavy objects were soon being hurled at the police, who, in retaliation, began grabbing people from the crowd and beating them.Weekend partiers and residents in the heavily gay neighborhood quickly swelledthe ranks of the crowd to more than two thousand people, and the outnumberedpolice barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn and called for reinforcements. Outside, rioters used an uprooted parking meter as a batteringram to try to break down the bar’s door, while other members of the crowdattempted to throw a Molotov cocktail inside to drive the police back into the streets. Tactical Patrol Force officers arrived on the scene in an attempt to contain the growing disturbance, which nevertheless continued for hours until dissipating before dawn. That night, thousands of people regrouped at the Stonewall Inn to protest. When the police arrived to break up the assembled crowd, street fighting even more violent than that of the night before ensued. One particularly memorable sight amid the melee was a line of drag queens, arms linked, dancing a can-can and singing campy, improvised songs that mocked the police and their inability to regain control of the situation: “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We always dress with flair / We wear clean underwear / We wear our dungarees / Above our nellie knees.” Minor skirmishes and protest rallies continued throughout the next few days before finally dying down. By that time, however, untold thousands of people had been galvanized into political action.

Sidebar: Radical Transsexual

Suzy Cooke was a young hippie from upstate New York who lived in a commune in Berkeley, California, when she started transitioning from male to female in 1969. She came out as a bisexual transsexual in the context of the radical counterculture.

I was facing being called back up for the draft. I had already been called up once and had just gone in and played crazy with them the year before. But that was just an excuse. I had also been doing a lot of acid and really working things out. And then December 31, 1968, I took something—I don’t really know what it was—but everything just collapsed. I said, “This simply cannot go on.” To the people that I lived with, I said, “I don’t care if you hate me, but I’m just going to have to do something. I’m going to have to work it out over the next couple of months, and that it doesn’t matter if you reject me, I just have to do it.”

As it was, the people in my commune took it very well. I introduced the cross-dressing a few days later as a way of avoiding the draft. And they were just taken aback at how much just putting on the clothes made me into a girl. I mean, hardly any makeup. A little blush, a little shadow, some gloss, the right clothes, padding. I passed. I passed really easily in public. This is like a few months before Stonewall. And by this point I was dressing up often enough that people were used to seeing it.

I was wallowing in the happiness of having a lot of friends. Here I was being accepted, this kinda cool/sorta goofy hippie kid. I was being accepted by all these heavy radicals. I had been rejected by my parental family, and I had never found a family at college, and now here I was with this family of like eight people all surrounding me. And as it turned out, even some of the girls that I had slept with were thinking that this was really cool. All the girls would donate clothes to me. I really had not been expecting this. I had been expecting rejection, I really had been. And I was really very pleased and surprised. Because I thought that if I did this then I was going to have to go off and live with the queens. And I didn’t.

Stonewall’s Transgender Legacy:

Within a month of the Stonewall Riots, gay activists inspired by the events in Greenwich Village formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which modeled itself on radical Third World liberation and anti-imperialist movements. The GLF spread quickly through activist networks in the student and antiwar movements, primarily among white young people of middle-class origin. Almost as quickly as it formed, however, divisions appeared within the GLF, primarily taking aim at the movement’s domination by white men and its perceived marginalization of women, working-class people, people of color, and trans people. People with more liberal, less radical politics soon organized as the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which aimed to reform laws rather than foment revolution. Many lesbians redirected their energy toward radical feminism and the women’s movement. And trans people, after early involvement in the GLF (and being explicitly excluded from the GAA’s agenda), quickly came to feel that they did not have a welcome place in the movement they had done much to inspire. As a consequence, they soon formed their own organizations.

In 1970, Sylvia Rivera and another Stonewall regular, Marsha P. Johnson, established STAR—Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Their primary goal was to help street kids stay out of jail, or get out of jail, and to find food, clothing, and a place to live. They opened STAR House, an overtly politicized version of the “house” culture that already characterized black and Latino queer kinship networks, where dozens of trans youth could count on a free and safe place to sleep. Rivera and Johnson, as “house mothers,” would hustle to pay the rent, while their “children” would scrounge for food. Their goal was to educate and protect the younger people who were coming into the kind of life they themselves led—they even dreamed of establishing a school for kids who’d never learned to read and write because their formal education was interrupted by discrimination and bullying. Some STAR members, particularly Rivera, were also active in the Young Lords, a revolutionary Puerto Rican youth organization. One of the first times the STAR banner was flown in public was at a mass demonstration against police repression organized by the Young Lords in East Harlem in 1970, in which STAR participated as a group. STAR House lasted for only two or three years and inspired a few short-lived imitators in other cities, but its legacy lives on even now.

A few other transgender groups formed in New York in the early 1970s. A trans woman named Judy Bowen organized two extremely short-lived groups: Transvestites and Transsexuals (TAT) in 1970 and Transsexuals Anonymous in 1971. More significant was the Queens’ Liberation Front (QLF), founded by drag queen Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower. The QLF formed in part to resist the erasure of drag and trans visibility in the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march, which commemorated the Stonewall Riots and is now an annual event held in New York on the last Sunday in June. In many other cities, this weekend has become the traditional date to celebrate LGBTQ Pride. The formation of the QLF demonstrates how quickly the gay liberation movement started to push aside some of the very people who had the greatest stake in militant resistance at Stonewall. QLF members participated in that first Christopher Street Liberation Day march and were involved in several other political campaigns through the next few years—including wearing drag while lobbying state legislators in Albany. QLF’s most lasting contribution, however, was the publication of Drag Queen magazine (later simply Drag), which had the best coverage of transgender news and politics in the United States, and which offered fascinating glimpses of trans life and activism outside the major coastal cities. In New York, QLF founder Lee Brewster’s private business, Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique, was a gathering place for segments of the city’s transgender community well into the 1990s.

#pride was a riot #lgbt+ history #lgbtqia+ history #pride month #pride #marsha p johnson #sylvia rivera #stonewall riots #stonewall #susan stryker #usa centric

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fortmacbusiness · 7 years

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Working in Fort McMurray

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I first visited Canada in the summer of 2009 with the intention of working in Fort McMurray, in the heart of Alberta’s oil sands. I arrived with no working visa, but was aware of the LMO (now LMIA) system. I was fortunate enough to stay with a friend from Fort McMurray who I had met in Ireland the previous summer.

Once I arrived in Fort McMurray, I started applying to all the engineering companies, as well as some of the larger oil companies. I was finding it difficult for a company to hire me without a work permit. After about three weeks, however, a geotechnical engineering company called Terracon asked me in for an interview. It went well, and I explained my situation and how the LMO worked. They offered me a job and started the process for my work permit. The processing time ranged from 2–4 months, so I decided to return to Ireland and work with my father in construction until my LMO was granted.

I arrived back in Fort McMurray in January, 2010. My cousin Shane, who had an IEC visa, accompanied me. As it happened, Shane got a job with the same company as me. It was a bit of shock arriving into the -20°C weather. It was like a scene from Cool Runnings!

Terracon were really good to me and Shane starting out. They gave us a few weeks to get our Canadian License sorted out, provided us with all our working Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and boots, free gym membership and, on top of all that, $1,500 in relocation allowance. It was a great start and really helped us to find our feet. We worked a month in advance for our first pay cheque. It was a nice feeling when the first cheque went into the bank account, especially after working three days a week in Ireland before I came out.

That first winter went by quickly. I got to work on cool projects at some of the biggest oil sands sites such as Syncrude, Suncor and Shell. It was crazy working alongside the world’s largest haul trucks and shovels the size of a four-storey house. Outside work I kept myself busy by playing indoor soccer and made an attempt at snowboarding and skiing.

Later that year a few lads from home moved over to Fort McMurray, and so the Irish community in Fort McMurray began. As the numbers of Irish in Fort McMurray grew, I started to wonder whether it was possible to start a GAA club in the city. I knew Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer already had clubs, so I thought ‘why not Fort McMurray?’ I sent an email to Edmonton Wolfe Tones GAA club asking for some advice. They were very excited with the thought of having another team in Alberta, and kind enough to send some footballs to help us get the show on the road.

In the summer of 2011, Fort McMurray Shamrocks was formed. The local Irish pub Paddy McSwiggins sponsored us with our first set of jerseys. The same summer, we took part in the Alberta Cup, finishing runners up, and participated in the Western Canadian Championship. It was a huge success and a great way to meet all the other Irish in Western Canada. I did not feel like I was so far away from home anymore, living and working in Fort McMurray became easier and I started making a lot of friends. To make things even better, two more of my cousins moved over to Fort McMurray in 2011. At that time, a company named Consun Construction started hiring a bunch of Irish lads, including two of my cousins. As most of the Irish working with the company played with the Shamrocks, the company started to take an interest. They kindly sponsored our team in 2012, and to this day are still our main sponsors.

One of the great benefits of working in Fort McMurray is the career opportunity it brings, along with the rewarding salaries. I was lucky enough to be making a good salary with Terracon, which allowed me to take two or three holidays a year while still being able to put some money away for savings.

In March, 2012, my Permanent Residency was granted. It was a great day. All the stress and worry about work visas was over. It had felt like a long two years of filling out forms, emails, telephone calls and passport photos. I was the first of the Irish lads that I knew of working in Fort McMurray to receive PR. Having PR in Canada opens up so many opportunities. It makes you more attractive for a company to hire you as they know you are going to be hanging around for a while. I had previously applied for some positions with the large oil companies but got shot down on the basis on not having PR — it was part of the job requirements.

Later that summer in 2012, I happened to be carrying out a basement inspection for a homeowner who worked for Shell. He was an Australian guy who had relocated his family to Fort McMurray about five years beforehand. We got chatting about jobs and careers and I expressed my interest in working for one of the large oil companies like Shell. He told me to send him my resume, and he would see what he could do for me. I did so, not thinking much would come of it. Not even a week later, however, I received a call from one of the lead recruiters for Shell Canada asking if would I be interested in doing an interview for a position as a mine planner in Fort McMurray. Before I knew it, I had done a successful interview and been offered a full-time contract. I could not believe the benefits, salary, work schedule and vacation I was offered. It was like all my birthdays came at once. Without any hesitation, I signed the contract and went to work for Shell.

My life changed so much. At first, I was working a Monday–Thursday shift working 10 hours a day bussing back and forth in buses that were provided by Shell (which we were paid to take!), but after a few months on site my schedule changed to seven days on, seven days off. With vacation included, I was working 22 weeks a year. I had never worked a job like this in my life.

I started to travel a lot, making regular trips to other parts of Canada, the USA, and even Mexico. One week I would work seven 12-hour days, and the next seven days I was basically on holidays. I even managed to live in Seattle with a close friend for a few months on my seven days off. I still had to pay rent in Fort McMurray, however, as I was still bussing in and out to work every day — a 2.5-hour round trip. To make thinks a little better, Shell brought in an Employee Value Program, which allowed employees to work on-site in Fort McMurray but live outside Fort McMurray. This meant that they provided you with a camp room on-site, free food, and the option of flying you to work from one of their hubs in Edmonton or Calgary.

Having lived in the small city of Fort McMurray for over four years, I felt it was time to start a new chapter. I had a few friends living in Calgary and, being close to the Rocky Mountains and Banff National Park, I decided to pack my bags and move. I have been living in Calgary since March, 2014, and it’s going great. I live with three other Irish lads who work shift work, so we are always coming and going. I love the lifestyle of working for one week, then getting a week off. You completely chill out, and the schedule is great for travelling. I take regular trips to Banff and play lots of golf. Socializing, of course, takes up a big part of my weekend! I am taking a trip home to Ireland later this summer, and plan on taking a trip to Thailand.

I plan on returning home one day. My heritage is important to me. But for now I could not be happier — I’m lucky to have what I have.

Source: Working in Fort McMurray

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