monument to Monica helms

I am proposing a monument to honor Monica Helms; she is a trans activist and the creator of the transgender flag. Her monument would be a bronze statue in Helms’ image and would stand on a pedestal along 7th Avenue in the West Village in New York City, modeled after the copious amounts of classical-style bronze statues around New York and America as a whole.

Monica Helms was born in 1951 and was in the Navy for eight years, from 1970 to 1978; she was stationed in San Francisco a few years before she left the navy, where she found the LGBT community and stayed in the city after she left. Because of her community in San Francisco, she was able to start hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, in 1995 and began living full-time as a woman in 1997. In 1999, she decided to create the transgender flag; pink stripes for transgender women, blue stripes for transgender men, and a white stripe for those who are questioning, currently in transition, and/or whose genders fall outside of the gender binary. She debuted the flag at the Phoenix, Arizona Pride parade in 2000, and donated the original flag to the Smithsonian in 2014. When talking about the necessity of the transgender community’s own flag rather than just using the rainbow flag since it is for the entire LGBT community, Helms said, “I say the rainbow flag is like the American flag: everybody’s underneath that, but each group, like each state, has their own individual flag.” She has since become a transgender activist, advocating for transgender rights across the U.S.

As previously mentioned, the monument will be a life-size or larger bronze statue of Helms herself on top of a pedestal, with a plaque explaining her significance. I deliberately want it to be a simple, classical-style statue to subvert the notion that the only people who get monuments of them are old white men. The vast majority of traditional, permanent monuments are dedicated to old white men, and even though there has been a recent effort to include people in different communities, almost all of the monuments across the country are still old white men. There are incredibly few monuments dedicated to women, and even less dedicated to women of color. The monument dedicated to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera will be the first monument of transgender people in the U.S., let alone transgender women of color, and although this is a massive achievement for the transgender community, we need more forms of transgender representation in monuments than the most famous transgender people in U.S. history. We need to recognize and memorialize activists while they are alive for supporting their communities and doing history-changing work for and within them.