Every time I see someone proclaiming "LGB without the T" or "LGB without the TQ," I can't help but think: have you forgotten your own history?
Our rights did not appear out of nowhere. They were not handed to us because society suddenly became kind. They were fought for by a community that included gay men, lesbians, bisexual people, trans people, drag queens, gender-nonconforming people, and countless others who were all branded as "deviants" by the same system.
Stonewall was never just about one letter. It was a revolt born from years of police harassment and discrimination, in which trans people, drag performers, gender-nonconforming people, butch lesbians, gay men, and homeless queer youth all stood together because no one else would stand with them.
When AIDS devastated our community, governments looked away. Thousands died while politicians debated whether our lives were worth saving. Gay men were cared for by lesbians. Trans people organised, marched, protested, fundraised, and mourned alongside everyone else. Activists didn't ask, "Which letter are you?" before deciding whose life mattered.
That solidarity changed history.
The freedoms many of us enjoy today were won because queer people understood that an attack on one of us was an attack on all of us. We succeeded because we refused to let our opponents divide us into the "respectable" and the "disposable."
Now, some people want to rewrite that history. They want to pretend trans people were merely spectators. They want to erase the contributions of drag performers, trans activists, and gender-nonconforming people from the very movement they helped build. And they want to convince lesbian, gay, and bisexual people that throwing trans people under the bus will somehow make us safer.
It won't.
The same arguments once used against trans people were used against gay men. Against lesbians. Against bisexual people. We were all accused of corrupting children. We were all called mentally ill. We were all told we were destroying society. We were all told our relationships were unnatural. The language changes; the strategy remains the same.
If your movement depends on forgetting who stood beside you, cared for you, marched with you, fought with you, and sometimes died with you, then you are not defending queer history, you are erasing it.
Our movement has never been about abandoning the next group in line to be hated.
It has always been about solidarity.
No Pride for some of us without Pride for all of us.
#LGBTQIA #TransRightsAreHumanRights #Stonewall #QueerHistory #Pride #Solidarity 🌈
. Oxford's LGBTQ+ history (https://queeroxford.info/) 🏛️. DARWIN AND THE QUEER ORIGINS OF LIFE, forthcoming from Yale University Press 📚. Now living on England's South Coast (close to Brighton) ⛵. Trekkie 🖖. Classical music 🎵. Mainly on Bluesky (@rossbrooks.co.uk). Agent: https://www.philippasitters.co.uk/.
