In 2007, Barney Frank, an openly gay man from Massachusetts, was serving in the United States House of Representatives. Along with a number of others, he introduced a bill—the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)—that would protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It wasn’t the first time the legislation had been brought forward; since 1994, it had been introduced every year but one. However, 2007 was the first time the bill included gender identity.
Unfortunately, Frank’s bill died in committee, and its proponents felt that they faced a choice: drop gender-identity protections or wait another year. Frank decided to introduce a new bill that did not include gender identity. Many LGBTQ+ organizations protested, but one of the largest and most well-funded—the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—backed the new bill. Even after dropping trans protections, the bill passed the House but died in the Senate. Although Frank and others originally introduced a trans-inclusive ENDA, they were also the first to publicly backtrack on this inclusive vision. This led to a bitter divide between activists who felt that progress could only be made incrementally and those who believed that trans people’s identities and needs were being ignored—that other parts of the queer community were willing to “throw trans-people under the bus.”
For many trans people, the HRC/ENDA scandal represented more than a debate about one piece of legislation. It was also a reminder of multiple past betrayals. Since the founding of the gay rights movement, the role of transgender people has been precarious. On June 28, 1969, police conducted a raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village. Instead of acquiescing as usual, customers fought back, leading to three nights of riots. For years, the Stonewall uprising was portrayed not only as the birth of the LGBTQ+ movement—writing out of history the work of homophile groups of the 1950s and early 1960s—but as the first revolt. Many accounts of the Stonewall riots focused on white gay men. Recent scholarship has revealed that Stonewall was preceded by similar instances of rebellion, including riots at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco and Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles, both led by trans women of color. Historians have since corrected the record, documenting that many street youth, drag queens, and trans people (who called themselves transvestites at the time) were on the front lines during Stonewall.
Two of the most well-known trans figures in the early gay liberation movement were Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, the leaders of S.T.A.R., a group formed to help care for LGBTQ+ street youth. Johnson is said to have thrown the “shot glass heard around the world” that sparked the Stonewall riots, and Rivera to have launched the first Molotov cocktail (though she always insisted she had thrown the second). Rivera was a founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), and in photos both she and Johnson could be found out and proud leading demonstrations. During one protest, Rivera even scaled the wall of city hall. This in-your-face activism was extremely valuable to the movement, but at the same time often embarrassed more conservative activists. Many gay and lesbian activists did not want to be associated with gender nonconformity, preferring instead to present themselves to the public as exactly the same as straight people except in sexual attraction. Similar to the HRC/ENDA incident years later, advocates from the legal-reform-oriented GAA brought a nondiscrimination bill to the New York City Council but did not include protections for employees to dress as they wished.
Sadly, similar negative attitudes toward transgender people on the part of some mainstream gays and lesbians continue to exist today. During the 1990s and early 2000s, most large LGB organizations added a “T” to their names or official missions, although, for many, their policies did not reflect an investment in transgender issues. A 2015 Change.org petition called “Drop the T” made clear the differences of opinion that exist within LGBTQ+ organizations about transgender people. In an interview, the gay male author of the petition argued that
gay/bisexual men and women just ARE—we don’t need medicine or surgery to help us become who we believe we are, which is the case with the trans community. . . . The problem that develops when we are all under the same umbrella is that so many of our enemies see us as one and the same—that Caitlyn Jenner, for example, is a “homo,” when that is not the case. . . . This is why I think the two groups should separate and fight for our respective rights on the more sure footing of our own ideas rather than conflating two divergent concepts.
Even those people and organizations who would never take such a public stance against trans inclusion often discriminate in more subtle ways. Many large national groups call themselves LGBT, for example, but are predominantly led by socioeconomically privileged white gays and lesbians, often primarily gay men. When trans people are invited to participate, they are often tokenized—their photos used to promote an image of diversity, while their opinions are discounted.
The causes that these large LGBTQ+ organizations take up also reflect their priorities. Much of the last two decades was spent strategizing around same-sex marriage rights, although some organizations did also devote significant resources to other issues such as employment discrimination, adoption and other family law issues, and HIV/AIDS work. A number of critics, including trans writers Dean Spade and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, have argued that fighting for a “piece of the pie” through marriage-equality initiatives reinforces the categories of haves and have-nots, and it does not center the experiences of the most marginalized within LGBTQ+ communities, including those who are poor, homeless, transgender, and people of color. Instead of pushing for marriage, critics argue, in order to gain health-care coverage for same-sex partners, we should be lobbying for nationalized health care, which would be more inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.
The debates about the centrality of marriage equality are just the most recent in long-standing community discussions that reflect the distinct experiences of LGBTQ+ people based on their race, socioeconomic status, gender, and geography. For years, women have expressed their disappointment at the replication of patriarchy within organizations that emerged from these communities. “Dyke marches,” which often occur during Pride Week in large cities, began in the early 1990s in response to the perceived invisibility of lesbians and disregard for lesbian issues within the larger, often male-oriented LGBTQ+ movement. Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ), a nonprofit active from 2002 to 2014, provided a strong critique of capitalism and of the corporatization of Pride, and made significant gains in improving conditions for LGBTQ+ people living in shelters.
QEJ and other organizations such as the Audre Lorde Project, run by LGBTQ+ people of color, have emphasized the intersecting oppressions faced by marginalized groups within LGBTQ+ communities, and in some instances, individual activists have challenged larger organizations to recognize these issues. In the wake of the 2015 police killing of a seventeen-year-old queer Latina woman, protestors stormed the stage at the Creating Change conference, one of the largest annual LGBTQ+ events in the country, sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. They chanted “Trans Lives Matter!” and read a list of demands that emphasized the importance of movement organizations devoting more resources to trans and queer people of color.
Despite these fraught relationships within the LGBTQ+ community, there has been some progress in recent years. Blog posts proliferate about how gay, lesbian, and bisexual people can be good allies to their transgender friends and colleagues, demonstrating an interest on the part of many people to expand their knowledge. Trans people and LGBTQ+ people of color are occupying positions of increasing power within LGBTQ+ organizations, influencing the direction and type of activities they pursue. The LGBTQ+ community will never agree on everything, and it never should—diversity is one of its biggest assets. But hopefully, one day, it may be united in the pursuit of leaving no one behind.