"The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" is a 1987 essay written by Sandy Stone. In this essay, Stone responds to Janice Raymond's 1979 book The transsexual empire: the making of the she-male, in which Raymond's references Stone by name.
Stone's essay is foundational to trans studies for her thorough analysis of TERF ideology as well as her other arguments about transphobic society. Materials in the library collection are often in conversation with one another. A wider context can provide new perspectives into scholarship.
Dean Spade is a Barnard graduate and former BCRW Activist Fellow.
His work centers on mutual aid, transformative justice, and critical trans studies.
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Trans resistance to TERF organizing has a long lineage in NYC. At the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in Washington Square Park, trans Latina activist Sylvia Rivera fought her way onstage while TERFs beat and booed her.
Grabbing the mic, Rivera delivered a speech denouncing the organizers for abandoning trans people of color incarcerated in the city's jails. She also educated the crowd about the work of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), the collective she had founded in 1970 with Black and brown self-described street queens like Bambi L’Amour, Andorra Marks, and Marsha P. Johnson.
NYC trans antifascists have carried forward this legacy by fighting the sharp rise in TERF organizing over the last few years. When British TERF Kellie-Jay Keen attempted to hold a rally at City Hall Park
in November of 2022, a large crowd of trans people and allies disrupted her event so thoroughly that she was unable to make an appearance. In January of 2024, a "town hall" hosted by the TERF group Moms for Liberty on the Upper East Side was met with pro-trans protestors who held a picket outside the event, shouting down the attendees as they filed in.
Although there have been trans people at Barnard for a long time, the college did not admit trans women until 2015, making it the last of the "Seven Sisters" to do so. This was achieved through the organizing of Students for a Trans-Inclusive Barnard, a collective led by trans students like Dylan Kapit who ensured that Barnard's town halls were packed and centered the voices of trans girls in high school seeking to apply. During their time at Barnard, Kapit and other other trans students also advocated for gender-inclusive bathrooms and pushed professors to ask for students' pronouns and preferred names.
Almost a decade later, Barnard's stringent admissions policy still requires applicants to prove that they "consistently live and identify as women," despite the significant presence of trans men and non-binary people among its student population. Drawing on the protest lineages of Kapit and others, trans students are finding creative ways to call for the removal of this admissions language. In 2022, students Carson Stachura and Adam Johnson created Gender* in the Archives, an installation and zine project foregrounding trans voices in the campaign to open up Barnard admissions.