I have been very outspoken about my very strong belief that transgender people should be appreciated, celebrated, and accepted. However, this doesn’t quite serve as a response to an odd movement generally called “Drop the T.” These people contend that LGB is all the acronym should be, because L, G, and B are about sexual orientation, while T is about gender identity. This is typically paired with some transphobic remark about how all trans people are mentally ill, but I feel I’ve talked about that a decent amount, so I’ll focus on the former, nicer sounding argument. This is closely related to a less transphobic idea that LGBT is a purely political coalition, with no real similarities that bind them together other than the pressure of being marginalized minorities. Some have replied that LGBT people are share some similar, essential core, some binding similarity that makes them all more or less the same, at least deep down.
All of these ideas are bad history. To say that there is no reason to keep the T, or that LGBT is a purely coincidental, politically motivated coalition, or that they are naturally pulled together by some essential gravity is to ignore the very well documented history of American queer communities.
What binds all the letters together (including relatively recent additions, like Q, I, A, and P) is that they all, to some extent or another, buck gender norms. A man shouldn’t love a man, a man should only love a woman; someone with a penis shouldn’t wear a dress, only a pair of pants. (You might notice this is very similar to the logic the Supreme Court utilized in the recent Bostock ruling.) It’s impossible to deny the connection being gay has, and especially used to have, in the public mind with inappropriate effeminacy. In theory, a world of “full acceptance” would see the dissipation of the acronym, since the gravity of bucking gender norms would no longer exist, and the only remaining ties might be cultural vestiges like both gay men and trans women participating in drag races. While great progress has been made in normalizing more ways of expressing one’s gender, we aren’t quite there yet.
(Below: Marsha P. Johnson, Joseph Ratanski and Sylvia Rivera in the 1973 NYC Gay Pride Parade by Gary LeGault. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.)
Despite this gravity, there has always been conflict. Early gay men’s groups were sexist, which helped encourage the creation of separate lesbian and gay groups. Neither were always particularly kind to transgender people, and sometimes were deeply hostile. Consider this interview Eric Marcus conducted with Sylvia Rivera, an early transgender rights icon, as documented in The Stonewall Reader:
RIVERA: Marsha [P. Johnson] and I fought for the liberation of our people. We did a lot back then. We did sleep in the streets. Marsha and I had a building on Second Street, which we called STAR House. When we asked the community to help us [tears coming down face] there was nobody to help us. We were nothing. We were nothing! We were taking care of kids that were younger than us. Marsha and I were young and we were taking care of them. And GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] had teachers and lawyers and all we asked was to help us teach our own so we could all become a little bit better. There was nobody there to help us. They left us hanging. There was only one person that came and help us. Bob Kohler was there. He helped paint. He helped us put wires together. We didn't know what the fuck we were doing. We took a slum building. We tried. We really did. We tried. Marsha and I and a few of the other older drag queens. We kept it going for a bout a year or two. We went out and made that money off the streets to keep these kids off the streets. We already went through it. We wanted to protect them. To show them there was a better life. You can't throw people out on the street... We just didn't have the money. The community was not going to help us.
MARCUS: Were they embarrassed by you?
RIVERA: The community is always embarrassed by the drag queens.
(If you weren’t aware, a significant portion of the transgender community came out of the drag community.)
The animosity didn’t run one way, either. Virginia Prince was a transgender woman born in 1912, who in 1952 published what Transgender History calls “arguably the first overly political transgender publication in US history.” Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress used the word “transvestite” to refer to “heterosexual males who crossdress,” while “transsexual” and drag referred to “homosexual males who crossdress.” (Keep in mind that the language for transgender issues was and is still developing, and despite the different definitions, these people were direct and obvious ancestors of the contemporary transgender community.) Prince made these distinctions because she despised gay men and looked down on sex change operations. She held distinctively conservative views on masculinity and femininity and was active in driving apart the lesbian, gay, and transgender communities.
Dropping the T because “there’s no real similarity!” is unjustified. There is a similarity: We all buck gender norms, and face repercussions for it. At the same time, the myth that LGBT is just one big happy family and always has been is completely and utterly false. It’s neither been a purely political coalition of people whose only relation is oppression, nor an essential alliance of complete unity. History is rarely that clean.