Sylvia Rivera, two weeks before her death, protesting the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act’s exclusion of trans people in it’s protections
ph: Mariette Pathy Allen | 2002
Rivera called New York City legislators to her hospital room, where she pleaded with them to revise the legislation so justice could be done. As she’d written hopefully just the year before in her final essay Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones: “Before I die, I will see our community given the respect we deserve.” She didn’t.
SONDA would pass the following year without trans protections. The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, GENDA, would eventually be signed into law in New York state on January 25th, 2019, after a years long battle by activists within New York state’s trans community.
I'm a New Yorker and I remember going to protests about GENDA as a teen (I'm 25 now), which they had every year for years because our solid blue state still refused to get it done even though both houses of state legislature have been theoretically blue for a long time, because conservative Senate Democrats would caucus with the Republicans and vote reliably conservatively from a period between 2011-2018 to the extent that the Senate was effectively Republican controlled even with the on-paper Democrat majority. when I speak ill of shitty centrist Dems, I never mean that in a vacuum, I'm talking about those specific Senate Dems who kept us from having GENDA for nearly a full decade. Their names are Jeffrey D Klein, David Valesky, David Carlucci, Diane Savino, Tony Avella, Jose Peralta, Jesse Hamilton, Marisol Alcantara, and Malcolm Smith, and you should never vote for any of them even if they're running as Democrats.
All this to say, vote in the fucking primaries please and stop electing DINOs just because they're blue. "Blue No Matter Who" is horseshit. "Blue No Matter Who" had cost my fellow New Yorkers their rights for years.
