We are wrapping up the Pride Festival whirlwind that occurs every year from May through September. The Pride events in New York City and San Francisco featured transgender celebrities Laverne Cox and Janet Mock as grand marshals; the symbolic inclusion was an attempt by Pride organizers to signal trans-inclusion. Unfortunately, Stonewall is also the starting point of the tensions between the LGB part of the community and its transgender counterparts. Nowadays, we know that two transgender women of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, were some of the first people to fight back at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, and therefore basically gave birth to the entire movement. However, what’s rarely discussed is the degree to which transgender people continue to be marginalized within the LGBT rights struggle.
More recently, transgender protections have been pushed aside so that LGB rights will be seen as more acceptable to mainstream society. In 2007, Barney Frank, the most well-known and respected openly gay member of U.S. Congress, removed transgender protections from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the hopes that would help it pass. That’s when I started calling ENDA “SPLENDA”—light on protections for our entire community.
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