A Trans Rights Timeline

The transgender rights movement has been intertwined with other movements and has advanced through milestones that include a crowd at Cooper Do-Nuts in Los Angeles preventing police from harassing and arresting transgender and gay customers in 1959; a 1964 sit-in at Dewey's Lunch Counter in Philadelphia by local Black and gender non-conforming teenagers and members of the Janus Society that forced the restaurant to drop its policy of refusing to serve gay and trans people; resistance to police pressure around San Francisco's 1965 Gay Mardi Gras drag ball, followed by a trial victory by organizers with help from allies and the American Civil Liberties Union; the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco's Tenderloin, when trans women, drag queens, gay hustlers, and queer street youth fought back during a police raid; and the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York, where members of the TLGBQ+ community, including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLaverie, clashed with police for several days around the Stonewall Inn. The timeline also includes Lee Brewster's founding of the Queens Liberation Front in New York in 1969 in response to prejudice against gender non-conforming people; the 1970 creation of STAR House in New York by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as a safe house for trans youth; the 1976 M.T. v. J.T. ruling by the Superior Court of New Jersey that transgender people can marry based on their gender identity regardless of their gender at birth; Minnesota becoming the first state in America in 1993 to ban employment discrimination based on perceived gender identity; Gwendolyn Ann Smith's 1999 launch in San Francisco of the Remembering Our Dead web project and annual Transgender Day of Remembrance; Jean Doe's 2000 New York State Supreme Court order requiring her boys-home residence to allow her to dress according to her gender identity; Kylar Broadus becoming the first trans person to testify before the U.S. Senate in 2012 in support of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act; Laverne Cox's 2014 Time Magazine cover and interview titled "The Transgender Tipping Point: America's Next Civil Rights Frontier"; the 2015 announcement in Congress of a Transgender Equality Task Force and Barack Obama becoming the first U.S. president to acknowledge transgender people in a State of the Union Address; Gavin Grimm's 2016 court victory over his high school's bathroom policy; Andrea Jenkins becoming in 2018 the first openly transgender Black woman elected to City Council and the first to serve in any public office in America; the 2019 passage of New York's Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act and a Trans Visibility March of more than 1,500 people in Washington, D.C.; the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that workplace protection under the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to gay and transgender employees; and the 2021 firsts of Sarah McBride as an openly trans state senator and Rachel Levine as an openly trans federal official.

New York, New York · United States