After opening the door for lesbian athletes, acclaimed tennis player Martina Navratilova has spent the twilight of her career closing it for trans athletes. Now, she has gone beyond touted concerns of fairness and safety to history denialism.
On Friday, Navratilova responded to a post on X (formerly Twitter) and claimed that trans people did not exist in the Stonewall era. User Zoë Rose Bryant originally posted the following in reply to another (now deleted) post, “The modern gay rights movement would be nothing and nowhere without black trans women so take a seat and shut the f*ck up dumbass.”
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“I have no idea who you are,” Navratilova responded, “but you really should know more about the gay rights movement and its origins before stating these ridiculous lies as facts… there were no trans people back then. Try again with re- writing history.”
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For someone speaking with the confidence of an educator, Navratilova really has no idea what she’s talking about. Trans women of color like Marsha P Johnson and Silvia Rivera, whose involvement in the Stonewall uprising and the ensuing LGBTQ+ rights movement (including founding the Gay Liberation Front) are well documented.
One such trans activist, Magora Kennedy, recalled the fervor of participating that night in a 2021 interview. “I’m an original Black Panther,” she said. “So no, I didn’t have any fear. All I thought about was, ‘Hey, we’re finally gonna have our liberation one way or the other.’ That’s where my head was.”
But Navratilova likely knows all this. As users rushed to point out her ignorance, she clarified her statement with eye-rolling semantics. “There were no trans identified males then- tranvestites and cross dressers who were vastly outnumbered by gay men and lesbians,” she said.
‘Transgender’ was not in wide usage in the 1960s—words like ‘transvestite,’ ‘crossdresser,’ ‘transexual’ and even ‘drag queen’ could sometimes be used as a substitute, sometimes not—but that hardly means that trans people did not exist. No one was identifying as a ‘lesbian’ until the late 19th Century or ‘gay’ until around the mid-20th because the terminology was likewise different, assuming there was accessible terminology. Many queer people in the pre-Stonewall era wouldn’t have identified as anything out of sheer ignorance, with most terms being restricted to queerphobic diagnoses in medical textbooks.
When pressed with clear, easily searchable evidence of pre-Stonewall trans people, Navratilova backpedaled hard. ”I don’t say they didn’t exist,” she claimed, “but were very few and far in between and none were part of the LGBT progress , not back in the 70’s and 80’s. Stop re- writing history.”
She did literally say “there were no trans people back then” (and did not say how she knows they “were very few and far in between”). All Navratilova has managed to prove is that she herself is well versed in history “re- writing,” particularly when it’s her own ill-considered words.
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