The history just after Stonewall sheds light on how trans vulnerabilities evolved as well. In the days immediately following the riots, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals organized the Gay Liberation Front to work alongside the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, Women’s Liberation Movement, and student anti-war movements. The ethos was joint consciousness and radical political tactics. People who identified as drag queens, butches, or transsexuals (the term primarily used before transgender was introduced in the early 1990s) were all welcome thanks to the focus on solidarity.
This cooperative mood shifted fairly quickly, though, when the Black Panther Party requested contributions from GLF and other radical groups to bail out the Panther 21 (21 Black Panther members who were accused of planning an attack on New York City police stations and were later acquitted). Some white gay members of GLF argued that their meager treasury should only be spent on issues that directly affected gay people “as gays” and immediately broke off to form a new group, the Gay Activists Alliance. This split marked the beginning of an era of gay politics that catered primarily to the interests of white gay (and some lesbian) membership. The drag queens, butches, and trans people who previously felt welcome in GLF due to its radical approach to politics reported feeling silenced, demobilized, and excluded from GAA’s strict rules for what constituted a “gay issue.” Over time, GLF folded and other groups with similar approaches to politics as the GAA, including the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, continued to work on “gay issues,” while largely ignoring transgender and, to a lesser extent, bisexual people.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, movement leaders made the strategic decision to put daylight between gay men and lesbians on one hand, and transgender (and bisexual) people on the other, due to fears that trans people would weaken the argument that cisgender gay men and lesbians were legally entitled to the same rights as their straight counterparts. It was one thing to argue that denying rights to gay people is wrong because they differed from other citizens only with respect to the gender they happened to love. It was something far more radical, these leaders felt, to ask the public to rethink the gender binary and stability of sex and sexual attraction entirely, which the very existence of bisexual, and especially transgender, people tends to do. And so the mainstream organizations chose the path of least resistance.