Shared with permission from author Nicola Schulze:
There is something both beautiful and insufficient about a history month.
It can feel like a cry through a storm, a brief acknowledgment that will never fully account for centuries of erasure. And yet, we return to these months because they ask something of us. They ask us to remember, to widen the story, to reconsider who we center.
As we move from Black History Month into Women’s History Month, we at Women’s Foundation California are thinking about the women who did the most and were credited the least. We know that, so often, they were Black and brown women, many of whom were also trans women, because the fight for women’s rights and LGBTQIA liberation have always been intertwined.
So this month, we say their names. Marsha P. Johnson, an icon, advocate for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, those affected by HIV and AIDS, and gay and transgender rights. Sylvia Rivera fought to ensure transgender people were not sidelined in feminist and gay liberation movements. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who spent decades organizing against police violence and advocating for incarcerated trans women.
These activists embodied intersectionality not as theory, but as survival. Their work reminds us that reproductive justice and bodily autonomy affect people of all genders, particularly transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people, who are too often excluded from the conversation.
Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Métis/Turtle Mountain Chippewa attorney, suffragist, and federal civil servant. Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching crusader and journalist whose work advanced civil liberties for all Americans. These women were not footnotes. They were architects.
The women’s movement has often replicated the exclusions it sought to dismantle, erasing Black and brown women, and too often, trans women. We must recognize this pattern and refuse to repeat it.
Audre Lorde wrote, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” The experiences of trans women and all women of color are not a footnote to women’s history. They are essential to it.
History months are not about nostalgia. They are about correction. They remind us that our movement is expansive, and that when all women, cisgender and transgender, immigrant women, especially women of color, move together we are powerful enough to dismantle patriarchy and white supremacy. – Nicole Schulze