Transgender rights movement
The transgender rights movement is a movement to promote the legal status of transgender people and to eliminate discrimination and violence against transgender people regarding housing, employment, public accommodations, education, and health care. It is part of the broader LGBTQ rights movements.
Where they exist, legally enshrined anti-discrimination protections, and protections against targeted hate crimes, have been described as significant successes of the transgender rights movement. Another key goal of transgender activism is to allow changes to identification documents to recognize a person's current gender identity without the need for gender-affirming surgery or any medical requirements, which is known as gender self-identification. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights argues that legal gender recognition should be provided by states, in part because not doing so "hinders access to rights and services and puts trans people at risk of violence." The European Court of Justice ruled that states should legally recognize a person's gender without invasive or excessive requirements, and the Supreme Court of Japan ruled that forced sterilization cannot be required.
Human rights experts argue that transgender rights can be derived from universal human rights. The group Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights successfully argued that transgender people have the right to life under the American Convention on Human Rights. The right to security of person has been applied to transgender rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Other universal rights applied to transgender rights have included freedom of expression via the Yogyakarta Principles, freedom from discrimination under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the right to dignity.
History
Identifying the boundaries of a trans movement has been a matter of some debate. Conventionally, evidence of a codified political identity emerges in 1952, when Virginia Prince, a trans woman, along with others, launched Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. This publication is considered by some to be the beginning of the transgender rights movement in the United States, however, it would be many years before the term "transgender" itself would come into common usage.File:Maricas Unidas Argentinas, Revista Ahora, noviembre de 1958.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Members of Maricas Unidas Argentinas on the cover of sensationalist magazine Ahora, 1958. The organization is one of the first documented cases of trans activism.
Towards the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s, a small clandestine mutual aid network called Maricas Unidas Argentinas emerged in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which has been described as the first documented case of trans activism. Before categories such as travesti, transgender and gay became widespread, Argentine maricas or locas occupied a social position between what are now understood as gender identity and sexual orientation, including both effeminate gay men and people who would today be considered trans women or travestis. Under the Peronist government, repression of those labeled "amoral" intensified, and the Devoto prison became the main detention site for homosexual and gender-nonconforming people in Buenos Aires. In this context, MUA emerged as a mutual supporting those imprisoned and those released without work or family support. Knowledge of MUA is recent and has revised the historiography of Argentina's LGBT movement: while former member Malva Solís dated its formation to around 1948, the only known press report places it in 1957, still at least a decade earlier than Nuestro Mundo, often considered Latin America's first LGBT organization.
In the years before the June 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, other actions for LGBT rights had taken place.
An early but not widely known action is the Cooper Do-nuts Riot of 1959 that took place in Downtown Los Angeles, California, when drag queens, lesbians, gay men, and transgender people who hung out at Cooper Do-nuts and who were frequently harassed by the LAPD fought back after police arrested three people, including John Rechy. Patrons began pelting the police with donuts and coffee cups. The LAPD called for backup and arrested several rioters. Rechy and the other two original detainees were able to escape.
In August 1966, the Compton's Cafeteria riot occurred in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California. This incident was one of the first recorded LGBT-related riots in United States history. In an incident similar to Cooper's, drag queens, prostitutes, and trans people fought back against police harassment. When a transgender woman resisted arrest by throwing coffee at a police officer, drag queens poured into the streets, fighting back with their high heels and heavy bags. The next night, the regular patrons were joined by street hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBT community in their stand against police violence. It marked the beginning of trans activism in San Francisco.
In 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots, the term transgender was not yet in use. But gender nonconforming people like drag king Stormé DeLarverie, and self-identified "street queen" Marsha P. Johnson were in the vanguard of the riots, with DeLarverie widely believed to be the person whose struggle with the police was the spark that set the crowd to fight back. Witnesses to the uprising also place early trans activists and members of the Gay Liberation Front, Zazu Nova and Jackie Hormona along with Johnson, as combatants "in the vanguard" of the pushback against the police on the multiple nights of the rebellion.
Marsha P. Johnson later went on to co-found Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in New York City with a close friend, Sylvia Rivera. Rivera's early definitions around trans were very broad, including all gender-nonconforming people.
Rivera continued to be an advocate for trans rights and inclusion of protection for trans people in all LGBT rights legislation until she died in 2002.
In the 1980s, female-to-male transsexuality became more broadly known.
In 1992, Leslie Feinberg printed and circulated a pamphlet titled "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come". Feinberg's pamphlet begins by calling on the trans community to compose their definitions, invoking language as a tool that unites people divided by oppression. From here, Feinberg traces the emergence of oppression imposed by the ruling class using institutions. These institutions, run by the elite, enforce a gender binary at the expense of communal societies that encouraged liberal gender expression. Women were devalued, and effeminacy was disparaged to promote patriarchal economic privilege. According to Feinberg, the gender binary is a contrivance of Western civilization. Having acknowledged this, Feinberg encourages all humans to reclaim the natural continuum of gender expression that identifies trans individuals as sacred. Feinberg concludes by empowering the working class to liberate themselves from the ruling class, which can be achieved by directing the labor of marginalized groups towards the common goal of revolution.
During the early 1990s, travesti activism took off in Argentina, which established itself within the broader national LGBT movement as among the groups with the longest trajectory and impact.
In 1993, Adela Vázquez, a Latina transgender woman, protested in San Francisco over the government removing the transgender community from the workforce because they labeled them disabled. However, that situation is making some progress and is changing. By 2014, per The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force record, only 17 states in the United States of America had laws that protected individuals in the transgender community ; states that presented these protections then were: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. Furthermore, there are organizations that are working to increase the numbers of States having these laws like: The Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project; The Transgender Law Center; and the National Center for Transgender Equality.
On December 31, 1993, a trans man named Brandon Teena was murdered in Nebraska along with two of his friends. This murder was documented in the 1999 movie Boys Don't Cry starring Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena.
With the publication of 1996's Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg brought the word "transgender" more fully into use. Like Rivera, Feinberg also defined "transgender" very broadly, including drag queens and gender-nonconforming people from history. A dedicated communist, Feinberg included an analysis of many who are oppressed by the apparatus of capitalism.
Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate those murdered in transphobic hate crimes founded by transgender advocate, Gwendolyn Ann Smith, was first held in 1999 following the murder of Rita Hester in 1998. The "Remembering our Dead" web project was also set up in 1999.
In June 2012, CeCe McDonald was wrongfully imprisoned for having defended herself against Neo-Nazi attackers with a pair of scissors, which resulted in the death of one of her assailants. Her story was publicized by a GLAAD Media Award winning article in Ebony.com. Laverne Cox, openly trans actress on Orange Is the New Black, launched a campaign to raise the consciousness of cruel prison conditions for incarcerated trans individuals and rallied to free CeCe. After serving 19 months, she was released in January 2014.
On March 26–27, 2013, LGBT activists gathered at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., to support marriage equality, but amid these demonstrations, one speaker was asked to edit their proceedings to conceal their trans identity, and the trans community was asked to lower their pride flags. This incident follows years of tension between activist groups, namely Human Rights Campaign and the trans community, because the trans community is often neglected or blatantly excluded from events and political consideration. The incident resulted in a backlash and public criticism by the trans community. In response, activist groups apologized for the incident, and in 2014, HRC promised to energize efforts for promoting trans rights.
In Florida in March 2015, Representative Frank Artiles proposed House Bill 583, which would ensure that individuals who enter public facilities such as bathrooms or locker rooms designated for those who are of the "other biological sex" could be jailed for up to 60 days. Artiles claims that it was proposed for the sake of public safety.
In 2017, Kate Lynn Blatt, Civil Rights Activist, Became the first transgender person to sue under the Americans With Disabilities Act. In the landmark case of. Expanding rights to all transgender people in A case that has now become the backbone of most, if not all, federal rulings following its passage in May 2017.
In September 2017, the Botswana High Court ruled that the refusal of the Registrar of National Registration to change a transgender man's gender marker was "unreasonable and violated his constitutional rights to dignity, privacy, freedom of expression, equal protection of the law, freedom from discrimination, and freedom from inhumane and degrading treatment". LGBT activists celebrated the ruling, describing it as a great victory. At first, the Botswana Government announced it would appeal the ruling, but decided against it in December, supplying the trans man with a new identity document that reflects his gender identity.
A similar case, where a transgender woman sought to change her gender marker to female, was heard in December 2017. The High Court ruled that the Government must recognize her gender identity. She dedicated her victory to "every single trans diverse person in Botswana".
The Brooklyn Liberation March, the largest transgender rights demonstration in history, took place on June 14, 2020, in Brooklyn, focused on supporting Black transgender rights and drew an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 participants.
In 2023, trans rights protesters occupied the Oklahoma state capitol building after passage of Senate Bill 129.