Category Archives: perSISTERS designs

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

Fight for Something, Fight for Someone — for Sylvia Rivera

“Remember it was transgender people who gave you this liberation.”

“We were all involved in different struggles, including myself and many other transgender people. But in these struggles, in the Civil Rights movement, in the war movement, in the women’s movement, we were still outcasts. The only reason they tolerated the transgender community in some of these movements was because we were gung-ho, we were front liners. We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose. You all had rights. We had nothing to lose. I’ll be the first one to step on any organization, any politician’s toes if I have to, to get the rights for my community.”

Sylvia Rivera (July 2, 1951 – February 19, 2002) was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist. She was a passionate advocate for queer unhoused youth in New York and created the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR) group together with her friend, Marsh P. Johnson. They occupied a building where they provided housing and support to unhoused trans and gay youth. They struggled to find funding and were not supported by the wider gay rights community. Later in her life Sylvia managed the food pantry at the Metropolitan Community Church of New York. The love she found with her partner, Julia, and her commitment to helping people, did actually save her life when she was drinking herself to death. She had to fight for someone. She had to fight for something. 

With a later version of STAR, Sylvia fought for trans inclusion in New York State non-discrimination laws. The assimilationist mainstream gay rights leadership regularly neglected transgender rights as too extreme and off-putting to straight politicians. They claimed that trans rights could be added later. Sylvia demanded that transgender people be included in the discussions and their rights be included from the start. As a multiply marginalized person, she knew that inclusion needs to be there at the start, otherwise it is not inclusion at all. Because drag queens were at the front of the protests when cops were bashing heads, they clearly should be included in the laws establishing gay rights.

Born in New York City, Sylvia had a Puerto Rican father who abandoned her family, and a Venezuelan mother who died when Sylvia was three. She was raised by her grandmother who was severely ashamed of Sylvia’s effeminate behavior. Because of this, Sylvia began living on the streets in 1962, just shy of her 11th birthday, and supported herself with sex work. She was taken in by the local community of drag queens, who gave her the name Sylvia. She used mothering language to describe her relationship to her community.

Sylvia described herself as a woman trapped in a male body. She also identified herself as a drag queen. She was most active at a time when the language describing herself was fluid, and she grew tired of making distinctions: “I’m tired of being labeled. I don’t even like the label transgender. I’m tired of living with labels. I just want to be who I am. I am Sylvia Rivera. Ray Rivera left home at the age of 10 to become Sylvia. And that’s who I am.”

Sylvia was all over the gay rights movement and you can find a lot about her online. 

Here are some useful things I found:

Wikipedia, as always. (Send them money! I do.)

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-rivera

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/24/nyregion/about-new-york-still-here-sylvia-who-survived-stonewall-time-and-the-river.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEXmJL9nadc

https://wams.nyhistory.org/growth-and-turmoil/growing-tensions/marsha-p-johnson/#

The Piers: Sylvia Rivera, 1990s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Rivera

https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/gay-power-is-trans-history-street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries

The Banal and The Profane: Melissa Febos
Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

BE SEEN for Judith Heumann

BE SEEN for Judith Heumann, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print here.

Judith (Judy) Heumann was born in 1947 and contracted polio at two years old. As a result she has had to rely on a wheelchair for mobility and needs care to perform some of the tasks of daily life.

It would be hard to exaggerate Judith Heumann’s importance in the international movement for disability rights. She has been a part of every important event in the struggle for disability rights. 

Her mother fought hard for Judy to get an education as a child because services for the disabled were minimal and classrooms were not accessible. As an older student she struggled to get access to education. She earned her B.A. in 1969 and had to sue the New York Board of Education to get her teaching license.

In the 1970s she worked as a counselor at Camp Jened, a summer camp for disabled people. Many of the major players in the disability rights movement were involved in this camp, which changed their lives. I encourage everyone to watch Crip Camp on Netflix, or at the free YouTube link below. It is an amazing story and Judith is one of the main characters. 

Judy was instrumental in almost all the disability activism in the 1970s including:

– Shutting down Manhattan traffic to protest Nixon’s veto of the 1972 Rehabilitation Act

– Getting hauled off an airplane for asserting her right to a seat

– Launching a sit-in—which ended up lasting 28 days—at a federal building in San Francisco, calling for a plan and funding to get Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act implemented and enforced.

– She was one of the founders of the groundbreaking Berkeley Center for Independent living 

Heumann earned her Master’s of Public Health at Berkeley in 1975 and proceeded to build institutional structures for disability rights:

– In 1983, she co-founded the World Institute on Disability (WID) as one of the first global disability rights organizations founded and continually led by people with disabilities that works to fully integrate people with disabilities into the communities around them via research, policy, and consulting efforts.

– From 1993 to 2001, Judy served in the Clinton Administration as the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in the Department of Education.

– Judy served as the World Bank’s first Adviser on Disability and Development from 2002 to 2006. In this position, she led the World Bank’s disability work to expand its knowledge and capability to work with governments and civil society on including disability in the global conversation.

– President Obama appointed Judy as the first Special Advisor for International Disability Rights at the U.S. Department of State, where she served from 2010-2017.  

– Mayor Fenty of D.C. appointed her as the first Director for the Department on Disability Services, where she was responsible for the Developmental Disability Administration and the Rehabilitation Services Administration.

She has played a role in the development and implementation of major legislation including the IDEA, Section 504, the Americans with Disability Act, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

As Senior Fellow at the Ford Foundation (2017–2019), she wrote “Road Map for Inclusion: Changing the Face of Disability in Media.” She also currently serves on a number of non-profit boards including the American Association of People with Disabilities,  the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund,  Humanity and Inclusion, as well as the Human Rights Watch Board.

Fully one quarter of our population has a disability. ANYONE can become disabled: it is the most inclusive minority group. Aging almost always involves some kind of disability.

SOURCES

This is the best and most thorough synopsis of Huemann’s story I have found:

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/judith-heumann

Memoir, with Kristen Joiner, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

Judith Heumann’s website

“Crip Camp,” documentary on Netflix, but you can also stream for free from here: https://wheelchairtravel.org/how-to-stream-netflix-crip-camp-movie-for-free/

TED talk in the fall of 2016, “Our Fight for Disability Rights—and Why We’re Not Done Yet”

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

KNOW YOUR SELF for Serena Williams

KNOW YOUR SELF for Serena Williams — perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print here.

Serena Jameka Williams was born on September 26, 1981. She is often called the greatest tennis player of all time. On August 9, 2022 she published a “farewell to tennis” in Vogue magazine, stating that she is “evolving” away from tennis, and will concentrate her energies on her family and her venture capital investments in women- and minority-owned companies. Still, on August 31, 2022, Serena beat the No. 2 ranked player to advance to the third round of the US Open tennis tournament. Her play in this tournament was a beautiful thing to behold. When asked in an on-court interview if she had surprised herself by playing at that level, she looked puzzled by the question and her answer was, “I’m just Serena.” She knows herself and what she is capable of. 

Here is the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYMYxpX_CoY

I loved her essay in Vogue and am excerpting some of her words below. The photos of her are amazing, too. She is just so formidable. Here is the Vogue link to her farewell to tennis:

https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-retirement-in-her-own-words

“Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family. . . . Don’t get me wrong: I love being a woman, and I loved every second of being pregnant with Olympia. I was one of those annoying women who adored being pregnant and was working until the day I had to report to the hospital—although things got super complicated on the other side. And I almost did do the impossible: A lot of people don’t realize that I was two months pregnant when I won the Australian Open in 2017. But I’m turning 41 this month, and something’s got to give.

…

I have never liked the word retirement. It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me. I’ve been thinking of this as a transition, but I want to be sensitive about how I use that word, which means something very specific and important to a community of people. Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me. A few years ago I quietly started Serena Ventures, a venture capital firm. Soon after that, I started a family. I want to grow that family.

…

One thing I’m not going to do is sugarcoat this. I know that a lot of people are excited about and look forward to retiring, and I really wish I felt that way.

…

Praise to these people, but I’m going to be honest. There is no happiness in this topic for me. I know it’s not the usual thing to say, but I feel a great deal of pain. It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads. I keep saying to myself, I wish it could be easy for me, but it’s not. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next.

…

I’ve never been one to contain my emotions. I remember learning to write my alphabet for kindergarten and not doing it perfectly and crying all night. I was so angry about it. I’d erase and rewrite that A over and over, and my mother let me stay up all night while my sisters were in bed. That’s always been me. I want to be great. I want to be perfect. I know perfect doesn’t exist, but whatever my perfect was, I never wanted to stop until I got it right.

To me that’s kind of the essence of being Serena: expecting the best from myself and proving people wrong. There were so many matches I won because something made me angry or someone counted me out. That drove me. I’ve built a career on channeling anger and negativity and turning it into something good. My sister Venus once said that when someone out there says you can’t do something, it is because they can’t do it. But I did do it. And so can you.

…

I don’t particularly like to think about my legacy. I get asked about it a lot, and I never know exactly what to say. But I’d like to think that thanks to opportunities afforded to me, women athletes feel that they can be themselves on the court. They can play with aggression and pump their fists. They can be strong yet beautiful. They can wear what they want and say what they want and kick butt and be proud of it all. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career. Mistakes are learning experiences, and I embrace those moments. I’m far from perfect, but I’ve also taken a lot of criticism, and I’d like to think that I went through some hard times as a professional tennis player so that the next generation could have it easier. Over the years, I hope that people come to think of me as symbolizing something bigger than tennis. I admire Billie Jean because she transcended her sport. I’d like it to be: Serena is this and she’s that and she was a great tennis player and she won those slams.”

DESIGN NOTE
This is the second perSISTERS print I’ve made for Serena. The first I made in 2018, “SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE.” In a way, that one could also have been KNOW YOUR SELF.