The argument was tactical: "We can win marriage equality if we drop the 'T.'"
The goal was to win rights by convincing straight, cisgender (non-trans) society that gay people were "just like them"—monogamous, conventional, and not threatening. To achieve this, some mainstream LGB organizations distanced themselves from the transgender community, as well as from drag queens, bisexuals, and queer people living with HIV. shemale cock measure top
What is less known is that three years before Stonewall, in 1966, transgender women and drag queens fought back against police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. When a police officer manhandled a transgender woman, she threw a cup of coffee in his face, triggering a riot that saw windows smashed and a newsstand set on fire. The argument was tactical: "We can win marriage
These events prove that the transgender community was not a late addition to the gay rights movement. They were the shock troops. They were the ones with the least to lose because they were the most visible targets of police violence. In the 1960s and 70s, it was illegal in most states for a person to wear clothing "of the opposite sex." While gay men and lesbians could hide their orientation to survive, transgender people could not always hide their gender expression. When a police officer manhandled a transgender woman,
This led to a painful schism. In 1973, the national gay organization, the National Gay Task Force, initially excluded trans people, leading to protests. As recently as the early 2000s, some "LGB without the T" groups lobbied against trans-inclusive non-discrimination laws, arguing that "gender identity" protections would confuse the public.
This shared oppression forged a deep bond. The "LGBT" alliance was born of necessity: gay bars were the only safe havens for trans people; trans activists fought for gay rights; and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s forced all queer people to organize under a single banner of survival. Despite this shared history, the relationship between the transgender community and mainstream LGBTQ culture has not always been peaceful. Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, a faction of the gay and lesbian movement pursued a strategy known as "respectability politics."
The transgender community is not a "trendy" add-on to gay culture. They are the elders who threw bricks at Stonewall. They are the youth fighting for the right to play soccer on the team that aligns with who they are. They are the artists, the nurses, the programmers, and the parents who are simply asking to live authentically.