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Today, trans and gender-nonconforming survivors continue a legacy of resistance that goes back longer than we may know.
By Gabriel Arkles
This article was originally published by Truthout
Today, trans and gender-nonconforming survivors continue a legacy of resistance that goes back longer than we may know.
Over the past year, we have seen the Trump administration repeatedly use the specter of sexual violence to scapegoat immigrants and trans people — specifically women and transfeminine people. Both historically and currently, these groups are disproportionately likely to face sexual violence, but in the right-wing narrative, they have been reframed as its perpetrators. While breathtaking in its hypocritical victim-blaming, this story is actually an old one: Powerful men excuse or deny their own acts of sexual violence while demonizing marginalized communities as the “real” threat to justify their repression.
But for as long as that story has unfolded, people have resisted. Every April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, a time to recommit to supporting survivors and preventing sexual assault. This year, I want to focus on some of those stories of resistance. For decades, trans people, queens, butches, and other gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. have resisted sexual violence in countless ways — whether through seeking policy change, opening their homes to other survivors, telling their stories, escaping attackers, confronting harassment, or organizing others to support survivors. What follows are just a few examples.
Frances Thompson’s 1866 Testimony
Frances Thompson, a Black disabled woman, was one of the many Black people attacked by white people during the Memphis Massacre of 1866. In the aftermath, she testified before Congress about her experience of being raped. Her testimony was part of an effort to pass the Reconstruction Amendments, and she won. Partly because of her testimony, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all people.
The promise of that amendment has yet to be realized. It did not even protect Thompson in her lifetime: Years after her testimony, authorities arrested and stripped her — another sexual assault at the hands of white men. Thompson was fined and jailed after these authorities learned that she was a transgender woman, and the white press speculated that, as a trans woman, she must have lied about getting attacked. She continued to speak out, telling a reporter about mistreatment from the chief of police — allegations the reporter declined to put in print. But Thompson’s legacy lives on, and still today, Black people, trans people, women, and disabled people targeted by the government use the 14th amendment as a legal tool to demand equal treatment.
Ralph Kerwineo’s 1914 Article
Ralph Kerwineo, a multiracial clerk in Milwaukee, catapulted into the public spotlight when his first wife, Mamie White, went to the police to report that he was assigned female at birth. She did so after he had left her and married a younger woman, Dorothy Klenowski. When put on trial, Kerwineo managed to convince the judge that he lived and dressed as a man solely for economic and safety reasons, not for any “immoral” purpose. Kerwineo used the media spotlight to condemn male violence toward women, writing about the prevalence of sexual harassment particularly in the workplace. He explained, “Don’t misunderstand me; there are good men in the world, just as there are good women, but living, both as a man and a woman, I have found that most men do not consider sexual sins of any great consequences. Two-thirds of the physicians I met made a nurse’s virtue the price of influence in getting her steady work.” Klenowski shared the same message, telling a reporter that she “had to leave place after place of employment because of the overtures to me by either the proprietors or others in authority.”
Don Solovich’s 1923 Report
Don Solovich, a Serbian-speaking immigrant, performer, server, and butler, refused to be silent when they encountered violence. One day in 1923, Solovich met a man named Macon Irby on the street in California. Irby commented on Solovich’s visible femininity, and Solovich explained they were a female impersonator. The two decided to get a hotel room together. Irby tried to initiate sex, but Solovich said no, after which Irby beat and robbed them. Solovich went to the police, and Irby was charged with robbery. Irby’s defense was that it was Solovich who tried to initiate sex, which outraged Irby so much that he beat Solovich. Irby denied taking their money and, in explaining why he beat them, imitated the feminine way Solovich walked for the jury. The first jury could not reach a verdict, so Irby was tried again, and Solovich would have had to testify again. That jury convicted, but the conviction was then overturned on appeal — the prosecutor had elicited testimony implying that Irby had sex with men, which the appellate court ruled was irrelevant to the issue of robbery. Years later, Solovich was killed, and their killer offered a similar defense for his violence in court.
Mabel Hampton’s Escapes, Around 1910, 1921
Mabel Hampton, a Black stud, dancer, singer, and domestic worker, encountered sexual assault numerous times in her life — and she found ways to get away. Her uncle tried to rape her when she was just 8 years old. She screamed and kicked, and soon after, she ran away, using money she earned dancing for change on the street to leave town. When she was a teenager, strangers assaulted her, and she managed to dash onto a subway car to escape when they tried to move her, narrowly dodging a thrown knife. This time she told her friends, who drew their own knives and looked for her attackers. Hampton supported civil rights and lesbian movements over the course of decades, and she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974.
Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s 1940 Letters
Pauli Murray, the Black transmasculine lawyer, writer, professor, reverend, and saint, is probably best known for their brilliant legal strategies opposing race and sex discrimination. But before they became a lawyer, they had their own encounters with the legal system. In 1940, when Murray was traveling with their girlfriend Adelene “Mac” McBeanthrough Virginia, they were both arrested for objecting to the racist treatment they received on a segregated bus. After white officers jailed them, some of the men in an adjacent cell started verbally harassing Murray and Mac. These men also used an angled mirror under the cell door to look at them, depriving them of any privacy. In response, Murray applied principles of nonviolent struggle and wrote a letter to the men, explaining how they had come to be arrested and stressing how unjust racial segregation was. The harassment stopped. Four men pushed apology notes back to them. The women Murray and Mac were confined with also became less hostile. As Murray wrote in one of their memoirs, “eventually we were all agreeing on the need for solidarity in the struggle for racial emancipation.”
Stormé DeLarverie’s 1969 Bail Money
Stormé DeLarverie, a disabled Black performer, survived plenty of violence in her life. While sometimes called a butch lesbian, male impersonator, drag king, trans man, gender-bender, or nonbinary person, she refused labels and expressed no preference on the gendered language people use. Deeply committed to protecting her community from street-based harassment and other violence, she not only worked as a bouncer at a lesbian bar, she also regularly patrolled the streets in her off hours to see if anyone could use her help. That’s what DeLarverie was doing at Stonewall in 1969 — just seeing if anyone needed anything. When a cop called her a slur and punched her in the eye, though, she spun around and knocked him out with one punch. Then she went home to tend her eye and get money so she could bail out anyone who needed it. She was often armed and never shied away from confronting someone harassing LGBTQ+ people, all of whom she considered her babies. Later in her life, she told an interviewer: “I’m a human being that survived. I’ve helped other people survive.”
Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 Speech
Sylvia Rivera, a Puerto Rican street queen, revolutionary, and another Stonewall veteran, supported her community’s safety through many means, including direct action and mutual aid. Rivera’s 1973 speech — now famous thanks to Tourmaline’s archival work — is a powerful example of how she called on others to show up for gay people beaten and raped in jail. “I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them. Have you ever been beaten up and raped in jail?” she asked the crowd. “They’ve been beaten up and raped after they’ve had to spend much of their money in jail to get their self home and to try to get their sex changes.… I have been to jail. I have been raped, and beaten.”
Rivera took the audience to task for failing their siblings, but she didn’t stop there. She called on them to come to the headquarters of the organization she co-founded — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) — to learn more. Among other things, the STAR Manifesto demanded “the right to self-determination over the use of our bodies”and “the immediate end of all police harassment.”
Dee Deirdre Farmer’s 1989 Lawsuit
Before Dee Deirdre Farmer brought her case to the Supreme Court and won, prison officials had nearly complete impunity when it came to allowing sexual violence in prisons. Farmer nonetheless pursued a case in 1989 demanding accountability after officials ignored the risk she faced as a young trans woman in a federal penitentiary for adult men, leading to her rape. She brought her case without a lawyer through the lower courts and all the way up to the Supreme Court, finally getting representation from the ACLU once she had convinced the Supreme Court to hear her case. Against the odds, she won, with the Supreme Court unanimously ruling in 1994 that violent assault was not “part of the penalty” for breaking the law. Her case has since been cited tens of thousands of times. In the decades since, Farmer has continued to advocate for trans, LGBTQ+, HIV-positive, and disabled people in prison, assisting over a thousand incarcerated people with their own cases.
Lorena Borjas’s Cart and Folding Bed, 1980s to 2020
Lorena Borjas, an immigrant from Mexico and survivor of trafficking, police violence, and domestic violence, helped countless other trans Latina New Yorkers survive pandemics, poverty, and violence. She worked relentlessly, usually without pay, to protect her community. She filled her cart with condoms and food and brought it to trans sex workers on the streets in Queens. Borjas welcomed trans people who didn’t have a safe place to stay into her own home, where she had a folding bed for them to sleep on. She connected trafficking survivors with immigration lawyers. She raised money to post bail. For countless survivors, she offered advice, connection, support, and love.
Juan Evans’s 2014 March
Juan Evans, a formerly incarcerated trans man and organizer with Racial Justice Action Center and Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative (SnapCo) in Atlanta, spent his life fighting for prison abolition and the freedom, health, and safety of trans sex workers and Black women, among others. In 2014, he was pulled over, and the police officer, surprised by his ID and gender presentation, demanded to know about his genitals. The officer arrested Evans for being trans, repeatedly threatening him with the assault of a strip search to inspect his genitals and calling him a “thing” and an “it.” His wife, his lawyer, and his boss came to the station and got him out. Afterward, Evans led a march and rally to demand change and spoke to the press. He received an official apology from the mayor and worked with others at SnapCo to push for better policies and training for police. Through SnapCo, he also used somatic healing to address the trauma of the experience, and continued organizing to close jails.
Alyssa Rodriguez’s 2022 Settlement
Alyssa Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican trans New Yorker, was criminalized and incarcerated several times, and advocated for herself and other LGBTQ+ people in carceral systems. She was confined in juvenile detention as a teen, where she was denied hormone treatment, forced to wear boys’ clothes and underwear, and punished for her femininity. She started legal action in 2006 that ultimately led to important changes in how transfeminine, gender-nonconforming, and LGBTQ+ young people were treated in juvenile detention in New York State. Years later, Rodriguez brought a lawsuit against the New York City Department of Correction when officials’ actions led to her rape on Rikers Island. While she passed away in 2020 before her lawsuit concluded, her estate settled the case for $1.4 million.
Fighting sexual assault has been a key part of many liberation movements, including movements for trans and queer liberation. Today, trans and gender-nonconforming survivors continue a legacy of resistance that goes back longer than we know. Trans and gender-nonconforming people — in the midst of the unrelenting and seemingly ever-escalating attacks on our communities — continue to organize to provide shelter, support each other, find safer havens, share our stories, defend ourselves, mobilize to protect rights, and demand accountability.
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
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