LGBTQ culture, at its core, is a culture of radical self-definition. And no group has embodied that defiance more literally than transgender people. When we trace the lineage of modern gay liberation, we do not start at a boardroom or a ballot box. We start at the in 1969, where two transgender activists of color— Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera —fought back against a system that refused to let them exist. Rivera, who coined the phrase “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” spent her life fighting not just for gay rights, but for the most vulnerable: trans youth, drag queens, and homeless sex workers.

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During the assimilationist pushes of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, mainstream gay rights organizations occasionally sidelined or explicitly excluded transgender individuals. The goal was often to appear more palatable to conservative lawmakers, a strategy that left trans people vulnerable and erased their contributions to the movement.

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While united in the face of external bigotry, the alliance between the transgender community and the LGB community has faced internal friction. In the 1990s and early 2000s, some gay and lesbian organizations pursued a "respectability politics" strategy: they argued that if they distanced themselves from trans people and drag queens, they could achieve mainstream acceptance. This led to the infamous exclusion of trans people from the 1993 March on Washington’s official agenda.

The term "transgender" emerged in the 1960s but was only widely integrated into the "LGB" acronym in the late 1990s and early 2000s. LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Rises to 9.3% - Gallup News