TW • Mentions of suicide; brief mention of sexual assault; missing people

Marsha P. Johnson was a famous transgender rights activist who played a large role in important moments for the LGBTQ+ community, such as the Stonewall Riots. Marsha was also a self-described gay person, transvestite and a drag queen.

According to Marsha, the "P" stood for "pay it no mind".

For the purposes of this chapter, I will be using she/her pronouns, although Marsha's gender identity is not fully known to this day. She never explicitly identified with the term transgender (which was not so common at the time), but she also liked to dressing in ways that would show the "interstice between masculine and feminine". Some sources say that Marsha used she/her, and some say she/he, so I will use she/her for now, but I can change it later on.

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Marsha was born on the 24th August 1945 as a male. She was the fifth of seven children to a working class family.

As early as age five, she started wearing dresses and challenging gender norms at the time but she was teased by other children and faced aggression. She was forced to stop for her safety.

At age 17, Marsha moved to New York, where she became heavily involved with drag and sex work. She was one of the first drag queens to frequently visit the Stonewall Inn.

On the 28th June 1969, when Marsha was 23 years old, the police raided the Stonewall Inn while she was present. Although she didn't start the riots, Marsha is believed to have had a prominent role in standing up to the police. She resisted arrest from the police and led a series of protests and demonstrations demanding rights for queer people. This established her as a key activist and role model to others.

Although the Stonewall Riots helped to raise some support for the LGBTQ+ community, there was still a lot of discrimination against them. For example, it was very common for young queer people to be kicked out of their family homes by their parents.

Marsha and her good friend founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) which was an organisation to support young queer people who had been left homeless.

Much of Marsha's life was spent helping other people, although she struggled with her own mental health. She was sexually assaulted by a boy when she was thirteen, and this affected her for the rest of her life.

Marsha was nicknamed the "Saint of Christopher Street", after the street that the Stonewall Inn was located on, because of the generosity that she had shown towards members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Marsha went missing in 1992, and the police found her body six days later. They said that nobody else had been responsible for her death, so they ruled it as a suicide.

However, many people — including her friends — disagreed with this sentiment, as it was common for queer people to be attacked at the time. Others said that they had seen Marsha being harassed by a group of thugs a few days before she went missing.

Twenty years later, in 2012, a campaigner called Mariah Lopez succeeded in getting the New York Police Department to reopen Marsha's case as a possible murder.

After they reopened the case, the NYPD reclassified her cause of death from suicide to undetermined.

Marsha's legacy lives on in organisations such as the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, which "protects and defends the human rights of BLACK transgender people".

In February 2020, the Mayor of New York renamed the East River State Park in Brooklyn as the Marsha P. Johnson State Park, and announced the creation of a statue of Marsha to be unveiled a year later.