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By Root 1904 0

adds that “historical disputes have no bearing—either way—on whether ‘gender identity’ ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation. Even if Stonewall was the casus belli of the gay struggle and even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what?” Carpenter argues that “gay civil rights legislation would be stalled or effectively killed in many places if transgenders were included. The choice is often between a more inclusive bill that goes nowhere and a less inclusive bill that actually becomes law. These are hard realities. We should not feel guilty because we want to make progress, least of all because someone is telling us fairy tales about our past.”

A law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity was finally passed in New York City on May i, 2002. Hours before she died, Rivera met with a group from the Empire State Pride Agenda to negotiate trans inclusion in a civil rights bill then being debated in the New York State legislature (the bill was passed without a gender-identity clause). When National Public Radio’s All Things Considered ran a program titled “Remembering Stonewall” in 2001, Sylvia Rivera sent the following update: “Since May, I’ve been the food director at the Metropolitan Community Church food pantry. My girlfriend, Julia, is my assistant and my computer person (because I still don’t know a damn thing about these new modern contraptions of yours!). We have been rather busy with the resurrection of street Transgender Action Revolutionaries and are planning protests around the trial of Amanda Milan’s assassins. So between the jobs and politics, you know how frantic it is. One of our main goals right now is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I’m tired of sitting on the back of the bumper. It’s not even the back of the bus anymore—it’s the back of the bumper. The bitch on wheels is back.”

She signed her note (dated July 4), “Revolutionary Love.”

Sylvia Rivera remained proud of her participation in the Stonewall riots for all of her life. “I am proud of myself for being there that night. If I had lost that moment, I would have been kinda hurt because that’s when I saw the world change for me and my people. Of course, we still got a long way ahead of us.”

The lack of trust between gays, lesbians, and the various groups generally lumped together today under the adjective “transgendered” became a public rift in 1974 for reasons that were partly political and partly aesthetic. Overtly gender-variant people were viewed with suspicion and distaste by some politically savvy gay men focused on gaining civil rights. For people whose goal was integration, not revolution, men in dresses were a decided handicap to public acceptance. The former advocated a right to privacy in the bedroom and tended to oppose flamboyant public displays of “difference” as counterproductive. They also increasingly rejected the view that gay men were more feminine than the average straight man. Instead, they emphasized their masculinity, a trend that was to become even more pronounced as the androgynous seventies gave way to the muscular eighties. In the nineteenth century “there was this very strong association formed between gender nonconformity and homosexuality,” says Simon LeVay, who sees an “overcorrection” of that association in the late-twentieth-century gay and lesbian communities, where “there’s been an almost excessive denial between homosexuality and gender nonconformity.” This attitude has been particularly acute among gay men, he says. “There’s definitely a femmephobia in the gay male community, generally a dislike of men who seem feminine.”

The political position of lesbians was complicated by their allegiance to feminism; neither gay men nor straight feminists fully understood or shared lesbians’ concerns. But lesbians, too, were incubating a new kind of sexual chauvinism. Lesbian culture in the fifties had been just as wedded to the concept of gender dimorphism as the medical profession, dividing lesbian women into “butches” (masculine