The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye

Author:Shon Faye
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141991818
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

There were up to thirty known molly houses in England during the eighteenth century, which, given the size of population, indicates an extensive subculture of this kind of sex work. By the nineteenth century, it was common for men dressed in female attire to be arrested on the same public-order grounds as prostitutes, or for ‘inciting others to commit unnatural offences’, even when they had not been engaged in sex work.

This historical connection between gender-variant people and sex work means that the history of their respective resistance movements – demanding less state oppression, less stigma and better conditions – are also interlinked: a phenomenon which had become particularly visible by the second half of the twentieth century. In the US, the trans and gender nonconforming people who led the Stonewall riots of 1969, like Sylvia Rivera, were street sex workers. By 1973, Rivera felt the emerging gay liberation movement was already forgetting trans and gender-nonconforming ‘hustlers’ in its quest for respectability. In a memorable speech, during which she was booed by the crowd at New York City’s Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, she chastised those ‘men and women that belong to a white, middle-class, white club’ for seeking rights for themselves without considering the conditions of queer sex workers. These people, whom she describes as ‘our gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail’, had been left behind – and the new gay rights movement did not ‘do a goddamn thing’ for them:

Have you ever been beaten up and raped and jailed? Now think about it. They’ve been beaten up and raped after they’ve had to spend much of their money … and try to get their sex changes. The women have tried to fight for their sex changes or to become women … I have been to jail. I have been raped. And beaten. Many times! By men, heterosexual men that do not belong in the homosexual shelter. But, do you do anything for me? No.

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