Sandy Stone on Living Among Lesbian Separatists as a Trans Woman in the 70s, is part of a growing archive of interviews with transgender icons and pioneers. In this particular piece, Zackary Drucker interviews Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone, a transgender icon whose courageous tale is centered around the time of 1970s radical lesbian feminism. In the interview, Drucker and Stone discuss the troubles that Stone faced living as a trans woman in the 1970s and how that affected and shaped her personal and professional life.
Like many trans individuals, Stone had a hard time being accepted by society. Throughout the 70s she struggled with her identity and her work. She was and still is, a brilliant woman who is coined “the original trans girl computer hacker.” She has years of experience as a music engineer and even built a computer in the early 1980s. However, this brilliance did not go unchallenged. She was denounced by TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and other trans-exclusionaries throughout her career. In one particular instance that she recalls, Stone describes attending a community meeting where she was met with angry TERFs who were calling for her expulsion from Olivia Records because they claimed that she was really a man, not a woman. To which Stone replies, in what I think is a great response, “First of all, that’s all bullshit!” Unfortunately, this response was not taken well and did not help her case. Threats continued to trickle into Stone’s life but she dealt with them the only way she knew how, saying, “okay, you’re in the present, something’s happening that hurts like hell, just be with it, now it goes away.”
Despite the challenges that Stone faced throughout her life, she made many great strides for trans individuals. In 1987 she produced the academic discipline of transgender studies by publishing The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto. She also describes being unlike many other public trans women of her time. She says, “I thought of myself as a woman, but at the time when thinking of oneself as a stereotypical woman probably involved homemaking. It didn’t involve anything like that, and it never has.”
This piece was very interesting to me and I loved how it was formatted in a Q & A structure. To read how Sandy Stone actually responded to each question gives you a sense of who she is as a person. It was also nice to read about how Stone dealt with discrimination and hardships in a time when being trans was not widely accepted—although, it still to this day really isn’t. I especially liked the final question about Sandy’s first name, Allucquére. She explains how it was from a science fiction novel and when first learning about the character whom she named herself after she says, “This is a woman who is known by one name who in fact, down a couple of layers of reality, has another name and layer of reality,” which describes Stone’s self pretty well as well.