Global South Perspectives on Stonewall after 50 Years, Part I—South by South, Trans for Trans

Abstract

The riots against a New York City police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar in June, 1969, are often identified as having sparked the movement for LGBT rights, and the commemoration of the riots one year later in June, 1970, inaugurated a series of annual LGBT Pride events that continues to this day worldwide. In this two-part Forum, we reflect on the contradictory effects of Stonewall’s international legacy. Which facts or legends are celebrated and which are marginalized fifty years later? How has the sign ‘Stonewall’ come to inspire and/or sideline other resistances as the US event became appropriated globally? In this first part of the Forum, Silva and Jacobo consider how trans women of colour in the Global South have pursued the struggle of the pioneering trans women activists in New York City and engaged the history of Stonewall beyond the United States, negating the whitewashing of discourse on the riots by hegemonic cis gay men and cis lesbian women of the movement, even in their respective nations, Brazil and the Philippines. This forum contribution pays tribute to black and brown trans persons whose bodies had been thought of as monstrous in the heart of empire and elsewhere, where empire remains. The authors together aspire to think the planet from their coordinates: south by south, trans for trans. From the sisterhood they forged, these two trans women from Rio de Janeiro and Manila, imbricated in their wounds but bound together by a will to heal, theorize resistance and reexistence as women in a decolonial, transfeminist present.

Transpinay: Genealogy of a term

“…For example, numerous Philippine activists and scholars have now taken up residence across the globe to carve out lives and livelihoods in diverse locations worldwide. Similarly, new scholarship is putting transpinay in conversation with hemispheric trans discourses, especially in South-South dialogs that decenter epistemologies of the global North (Silva and Jacobo, 2020). In these ways, transpinay is not, and perhaps never was, place bound.…”