Why Are Trans People Such an Easy Political Target? The Answer Involves a Surprising Culprit.

Trans activist Sylvia Rivera during her “Y’all better quiet down” speech at an early gay pride rally in New York City, 1973. Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library (1973)

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When news broke in February that the National Park Service, following an anti-trans executive order from President Donald Trump, had removed any mention of transgender people from the webpages of the Stonewall National Monument, many in the LGBTQ+ community were understandably outraged. But I was not surprised.

For one thing, the move only continued, in a small and yet symbolically potent way, the new administration’s aggressive and ongoing push to strip transgender people of civil rights and erase them from public life. But as a scholar of queer political history, I also saw a grim inevitability in the trans “deletion.” This historical vandalism, and the larger assault of which it is a part, has been, I’m sorry to say, only a matter of time. While it may be tempting to put all the blame on Trump or the Republicans or Project 2025 (and they deserve the lion’s share), to do so would be to ignore decades of choices, missed opportunities, and betrayals within the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement that, read together, show how and why transgender people find themselves so vulnerable to political scapegoating and attacks today.

The story starts at Stonewall itself—or at least with how we choose to remember it. Were the riots in late June of 1969 started by two transgender women of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson; a Black butch lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie; or, in the more recent popular rendition of the story by director Roland Emmerich, a white gay man from the Midwest named Danny wearing boat shoes? Disagreements among scholars and activists over who, exactly, threw the first punch (or purse, or brick, or shot glass, depending on which version you believe) have less to do with historical accuracy and more to do with asserting who, exactly, belongs in this central narrative of queer history—an event that, for better or worse, is widely viewed as the birthplace of the modern “gay rights” movement.

The history just after Stonewall sheds light on how trans vulnerabilities evolved as well. In the days immediately following the riots, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals organized the Gay Liberation Front to work alongside the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, Women’s Liberation Movement, and student anti-war movements. The ethos was joint consciousness and radical political tactics. People who identified as drag queens, butches, or transsexuals (the term primarily used before transgender was introduced in the early 1990s) were all welcome thanks to the focus on solidarity.

This cooperative mood shifted fairly quickly, though, when the Black Panther Party requested contributions from GLF and other radical groups to bail out the Panther 21 (21 Black Panther members who were accused of planning an attack on New York City police stations and were later acquitted). Some white gay members of GLF argued that their meager treasury should only be spent on issues that directly affected gay people “as gays” and immediately broke off to form a new group, the Gay Activists Alliance. This split marked the beginning of an era of gay politics that catered primarily to the interests of white gay (and some lesbian) membership. The drag queens, butches, and trans people who previously felt welcome in GLF due to its radical approach to politics reported feeling silenced, demobilized, and excluded from GAA’s strict rules for what constituted a “gay issue.” Over time, GLF folded and other groups with similar approaches to politics as the GAA, including the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, continued to work on “gay issues,” while largely ignoring transgender and, to a lesser extent, bisexual people.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, movement leaders made the strategic decision to put daylight between gay men and lesbians on one hand, and transgender (and bisexual) people on the other, due to fears that trans people would weaken the argument that cisgender gay men and lesbians were legally entitled to the same rights as their straight counterparts. It was one thing to argue that denying rights to gay people is wrong because they differed from other citizens only with respect to the gender they happened to love. It was something far more radical, these leaders felt, to ask the public to rethink the gender binary and stability of sex and sexual attraction entirely, which the very existence of bisexual, and especially transgender, people tends to do. And so the mainstream organizations chose the path of least resistance.

A few examples from my archival research show how time and time again transgender people have been made vulnerable by decisions to not center, or even include them, in political organizing.

Take, for instance, what happened when separate gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender interest groups proliferated in the 1990s. In September 1998, the National Policy Roundtable—a meeting of executive directors from all the major lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender interest groups—was convened in D.C. to discuss strategies to confront the rise of conversion therapy, the quack practice that promised to make gay men and lesbians into upstanding heterosexual members of society. The key problem on the agenda at that meeting was whether sexuality is immutable, which had become an issue due to Christian conversion therapy programs that claimed that gay men and lesbians were not expressing “innate” sexuality but rather simply in need of therapeutic modifications to change their desires.

At the meeting, Chai Feldblum of the Georgetown University Law Center proposed sidestepping that question in favor of emphasizing a less heady and more palatable platform: that gay men and lesbians simply wanted to get married and start families. “To me, what we need to do is say that taking this action is good for the individual, good for the family, and good for society,” she said in response to questions about immutability and conversion therapy. Feldblum went on to explain her position. “It’s morally good. … And having loving families is good for society.” Another participant agreed, explaining that “nature/nurture is less the question than presenting the meaning of homosexuality.” The “meaning” of gay and lesbian identification alluded to here was akin to the promise of coming out: allowing self-love, acceptance, and pride to model a utopian world where all are valued.

For these leaders, ignoring questions about the immutability of sexuality was a move in the direction of recognizing gay- and lesbian-headed families. Doing so would not dramatically alter the social fabric and challenge traditional mores but rather extend and bolster them by merely folding in gay men and lesbians, based on the argument that variations in human sexuality are natural and inherent.

However, other participants drew attention to the possibility that this strategy might exclude transgender and bisexual members of the community. Transgender activists were concerned that the focus on sexuality would leave gender out of the picture and render the demographically small group even more powerless; meanwhile, bisexuals were worried that the focus on immutability would diminish their passionate view that desire is flexible and not defined by gender.

Jessica Xavier—founder of the transgender lobbying group It’s Time, America!—proposed addressing these tensions in relation to conversion therapy by focusing on how the tie that truly binds LGBTQ+ people together is not sexuality but gender variance. “We talk about gender variance when men take jobs as nurses [and] when men have long hair,” she said, to explain why the pivot away from morality toward gender variance was necessary. If you extend this view, you quickly realize that engaging in same-sex sexual relationships is in itself a defiance of gender norms, much like career and grooming choices. Xavier elaborated her perspective: “If we frame this as a larger societal pressure that reaches to straight people … If we all realize that we’re fighting the same enemy in different ways, that language has more implications for society: It’s gender.” Gender and sexuality are impossible to tease apart, and those connections affect everybody who has ever worried that maybe they aren’t “man enough” or “a good woman.” Attacks on transgender people are toothless in a social world where everybody is freed from strict gender norms. But such freedom also makes it harder to control populations, which might explain why political power grabs usually feature some aspect of suppressing gender expression.

Sidelining transgender people from the mainstream gay and lesbian movement came to a head in 2007, when Democrats took advantage of their new congressional majority to introduce the Employment Non-discrimination Act, which proposed federal protections for workers on the basis of sexual orientation. Transgender people were conspicuously absent from the final legislation, which, unsurprisingly, did not sit well with that community.

Openly gay Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank sponsored the bill and offered a lengthy defense of his decision to remove protections for transgender people from ENDA. After explaining that the moment was right for ENDA because gay men and lesbians had worked for decades to educate lawmakers and voters that sexual orientation discrimination is unjust, Frank set responsibility for the exclusion of gender identity protections squarely on the shoulders of transgender people. “One of the problems I have found over the years of discussing this is an unwillingness on the part of many, including leaders in the transgender community, to acknowledge a fact: namely that there is more resistance to protection for people who are transgender than for people who are gay, lesbian, and bisexual,” Frank flatly stated at the time. His view was echoed by others across the political spectrum including the Washington Post editorial board, which opined that transgender people ought to educate people on transgender discrimination if they wanted to be included in workplace protections.

In any case, the 2007 ENDA failed to pass (it remains on the legislative sidelines to this day). A wave of laws defining marriages as exclusive to one man and one woman between the late 1990s and 2015 drew the movement’s attention away from ENDA and toward marriage equality, which was eventually won at the Supreme Court. Ironically, in 2020, that same body ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that employment discrimination against a gay man is, in fact, gender discrimination because, as Xavier argued almost 20 years earlier, sexuality and gender are impossible to tease apart.

These examples represent just a handful of many moments when gay and lesbian activists participated in the erasure (and stigmatization) of transgender people because, as they saw it, the transgender group was too small; gender variance would be too hard to explain to middle America; and, as one line of reasoning went, maybe transgender people needed their own organizations to do that work. Over time, focusing on sexuality, relationships, and families headed by same-sex partners meant that gender essentially fell off the “LGBT” agenda—until suddenly it became the right’s primary target. As a result, transgender people are now vulnerable to political attacks for many reasons, not least of which is the missed opportunity over those many decades to educate the public about gender norms and gender variance. It’s safe to say that this history might also be why those in power can behave as though the group doesn’t have the backing of a critical mass of supporters or influential allies—because of this legacy of negligence by the larger movement, frankly, they don’t.

Clearly, the resistance to addressing gender head-on earlier in our history has had a broader impact on how LGBTQ+ politics are understood today. In particular, the failure to center gender and the ideas about masculinity and femininity that affect us all (not just LGBTQ+ people) has meant that coalitions with other groups were over before they began. These include most obviously organizations fighting for reproductive rights and gender equity, as well as others focused on bodily autonomy, such as activists looking to preserve the right to asylum, provide food and shelter to poor and homeless people, and end mass incarceration.

In February, Lamba Legal and seven other LGBTQ+ organizations announced that they were suing the Trump administration for erasing transgender people from laws and defunding critical support for people living with HIV. This is certainly a step in the right direction. If history is any indication, it will be even stronger when gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people join with advocates of bodily autonomy across the board to recognize that—in general, but especially under this viciously hostile administration—our fates are all bound together.