In the ’70s, Gay Rights Activists Abandoned Their Trans Siblings

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

On June 24, 1973, a beleaguered Sylvia Rivera made her way to the podium to speak at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, the forerunner of the annual Pride parade in New York City. She had fought against organizers to get her turn on the microphone. Even as she advocated for homeless and incarcerated gays and lesbians, the mostly LGB crowd booed her.

“I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers, and your gay sisters, in jail,” the trans activist yelled with exasperation while pacing the stage. “I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail . . . for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way?”

Rivera and her trans friend and mentor Marsha P. Johnson had been instrumental in the growing LGBT rights movement, with Johnson playing a crucial role in the Stonewall riots of 1969. Yet they found themselves banned from Pride parades, and were told that they gave the movement “a bad name.” Rivera’s fury was emblematic of this growing split in the early 1970s between the gay and lesbian communities and the transgender siblings that they increasingly sought to exclude from the turbocharged post-Stonewall gay civil rights movements.

The Stonewall riots led to a sea change in LGBT activism, quickly giving rise to thousands of new organizations and the institution of Pride marches. What had previously been unthinkable — thousands of queers marching in the streets celebrating who they were — was now a reality.

On the first anniversary of Stonewall, gay New Yorkers marched for liberation in what became known as the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally and March, the forerunner of Pride. Yet trans people were not wanted there. As recounted by Genny Beemyn in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies, trans people were told to stay in the back. As revolutionary as were the Christopher Street marches and their counterparts in cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, in many people’s eyes celebrating trans people was a step too far.

At San Francisco Pride, trans exclusion became a matter of course. According to trans historian Susan Stryker, in 1973 the nascent Pride movement met a fork in the road. Two dueling Pride events sought to engage LGBT audiences — a trans-inclusive event organized by Reverend Ray Broshears, a preacher and militant gay activist, and one organized by lesbian separatists and conservative gay men that explicitly told trans people to stay away. It was the latter event that would go on to become the annual San Francisco Pride Parade.

“These two events represented two different styles of queer activism,” Stryker told me. “Ray was more street-oriented, whereas the people connected with the other event were more respectability-oriented. The people who were most involved with that latter event were like Bill Plath, who was president of the Society for Individual Rights, which was not particularly pleasant toward trans people.”

Assimilation over collective liberation

Trans people were left out or ignored elsewhere in the Bay Area. In September 1973, when trans people marched to protest their eviction from the Hyland Hotel in the Tenderloin, only Broshears and the 33 evicted trans tenants showed up. In another slight to the trans community, media coverage of San Francisco’s 1972 Gay Pride Parade erroneously claimed that gay men defended trans people during the pivotal 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin. This was the exact opposite was the truth, as it was the trans women who led the charge in protection of gays in a face-off with police.

Such actions were part of a growing consensus that trans people were bad optics for the burgeoning gay rights movement. One of San Francisco’s leading organizations, the Society for Individual Rights, pushed for gay assimilation rather than collective liberation. In a 1968 survey of its membership, the organization published this opinion, which was emblematic of the consensus: “Our public behavior is of supreme importance . . . the homosexual who dresses as a woman for the purpose of solicitation or to declare his femininity should be rejected by SIR.”

Activist and folk singer Beth Elliott was another trans woman who found herself on the outside of San Francisco’s developing gay rights movement. As a teen struggling with her gender identity, she had found community with the San Francisco chapter of the lesbian civil rights organization Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in the early 1970s. Around that time, as Elliott turned 20, she managed to get a hormone prescription — a staggering achievement at the time — and she fought for years to receive sex reassignment surgery via the transgender clinic at Stanford University.

Yet while some members of DOB supported Elliott through her journey, others accused her of being a man infiltrating women’s spaces, and she was eventually expelled from the organization. As she told interviewer Mason Funk as part of the Outwords queer history project, Daughters of Bilitis was becoming more and more trans-exclusionary throughout the early ’70s. “In the fall [of 1972], they were getting more hardcore and they were pushing the radical conformity,” she recalled. “They had a vote [on my exclusion]. I did not just slink away. I said, I know you’re going to kick me out, but I want you to own that. I’m not going to make it easy for you. You have to kick me out, and they did, the vote margin was about four to three, percentage-wise.”

Anti-trans backlash grew in 1979, when academic Janice Raymond published her lurid book The Transexxual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. It advanced the bizarre theory that trans women were part of a medical conspiracy to subvert feminism; conflated gender-affirming care with Nazi experiments; and included such baseless accusations as “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies.” Yet her words reached many, and inspired threats of violence against trans women such as Sandy Stone, the audio engineer at feminist music label Olivia Records, whom Raymond defamed in her book.

These exclusionary actions had serious consequences. With no one to defend trans people, anti-trans activists like Janice Raymond and Paul McHugh, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, were able to shut down the few clinics that catered to trans people, making gender-affirming care virtually impossible to access by the end of the ’70s. In the ’80s, trans people experienced a wave of repression and decline made only worse by the AIDS epidemic; they only slowly began to win back space in society through the late ’90s and 2000s.

Laying the groundwork for today’s anti-trans legislation

There were many reasons why gay and lesbian activists so cruelly and baselessly expelled their trans siblings from the growing Pride movement. The leading LGBT organizations of the day, such as the Society for Individual Rights and the Daughters of Bilitis, saw assimilation as the key to acceptance. The movement focused on marriage as the path toward winning over the straight world — but trans people were (and still widely are) seen as an inherent threat to the nuclear family.

Moreover, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association formally removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, taking a major step in normalizing gay and lesbian lives. Gender identity disorder, the equivalent diagnosis for trans people, would remain until 2013. And even now, over a decade later, trans existence is still widely pathologized.

The T is also still often severed from the LGB for political expediency. For instance, in 2007 the gay Congressman Barney Frank explicitly excluded trans people from his efforts to pass anti-discrimination legislation for LGB individuals, dismissing calls for trans inclusion with the argument that, “People who . . . denounce those who take reality into account . . . make it impossible for us to govern.” Eighteen years later, President Donald Trump further stoked division with his executive order stating that the federal government only recognizes “two sexes, male and female,” as assigned at birth. Federal agencies have removed any mentions of trans people from official language — including the National Park Service, which deleted the word “transgender” from its educational website about the Stonewall National Monument.

After three decades of being largely shut out of Pride events, trans people did retake their place at San Francisco Pride when the Trans March became a part of celebrations in 2004. Yet the seat at the table is tenuous. With retailers like Target and tech giants like Meta and Google casually erasing the small protections and inclusions that they had offered trans people, it is clear that the gains made by the trans community are fragile at best.

Earlier this year California Gavin Newsom made headlines when he invited right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk onto the first episode of his podcast, giving little pushback as Kirk repeatedly slandered trans people. For the politician who had made his name by offering marriages to gays and lesbians, many political observers saw this as a move to tack toward the center in advance of a presidential bid. SF Pride Executive Director Suzanne Ford, a trans woman, quickly denounced the podcast as a “betrayal,” but Newsom was not deterred, following up with transphobic guests like Steve Bannon and Michael Savage.

In spite of decades of effort to be included in the wider struggle for queer rights, trans rights are still all too often seen as expendable. As Rivera said in 2001, just one year before she passed at the age of 50 after a lifetime of fighting in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, “I gave them their Pride, but they have not given me mine.” In 2025, that sentiment still echoes for many in the trans community.