Stonewall Was Always Trans, Too

The British charity named after a riot started by trans women just told us not to worry. Here's why I am worried anyway.

Photo by Jennifer Bonauer on Unsplash

I gasped when I read it.

A friend texted me the link last week. In her first interview, the new chair of Stonewall told The Guardian she had “huge respect” for the author whose money helped fund the legal case that just rewrote British trans rights.

I sat with my phone for a long minute. I am a trans woman. I am queer. I read history. And I thought, of all the things to say in your first interview, you said that?

Then I thought something else. I am not going to write her name in this post. You can find it in the citations if you want it. I am not giving her a free promotion in my prose.

What I will do is tell you what the Stonewall charity is named after, since it seems somebody needs reminding.

The riot was named for

The word “Stonewall” comes from a six-night uprising at a gay bar on Christopher Street in New York City, starting in the early hours of June 28, 1969. When the British charity was founded in May 1989 by Ian McKellen, Lisa Power, Michael Cashman, and others, the founders deliberately chose that name. They were saying: We come from this. We owe it.

So who was actually at that bar?

Marsha P. Johnson was there. A 23-year-old Black self-identified drag queen who would today most likely be called a transgender woman. The Smithsonian Institution lists her among the most well-known participants in the uprising. Historian David Carter’s research places her at the forefront of the resistance, hurling a shot glass into a mirror and screaming, “I got my civil rights.”

Sylvia Rivera was 17. A drag queen of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent who later identified as transgender. “We were the frontliners,” she said in a later interview. “We didn’t take no shit from nobody. We had nothing to lose.”

Stormé DeLarverie was a biracial butch lesbian and drag king performer. Multiple eyewitnesses identified her as the cuffed lesbian whose shouted demand to the crowd to “do something” appears to have turned bystanders into participants.

Trans women. Drag queens of color. Butch lesbians. They were on the front line since police had beaten them, denied apartments, denied jobs, and arrested them under New York’s three-piece clothing law that criminalized cross-dressing.

Stonewall did not happen despite trans participation. Stonewall happened in part since trans people refused to comply.

They tried to throw trans people under the bus in 1973

Here is the part of the story that gets skipped over.

In 1970, Marsha and Sylvia co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)and opened the first STAR House for unhoused trans youth in Greenwich Village. They joined the Gay Liberation Front. They built the organizing infrastructure that gay men would later inherit.

Then came 1973. The exclusion did not come from the gay movement as a whole. It came from a specific faction. Lesbian Feminist Liberation, led by Jean O’Leary, distributed flyers at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally calling trans women “female impersonators” and tried to keep STAR off the stage. Sylvia Rivera grabbed the microphone anyway and delivered her famous “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech, telling the booing crowd: “I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment. For gay liberation, and you all treat me this way?”

O’Leary later regretted her stance.

And here is the part that the simple version skips. Plenty of white gay men pushed back against the exclusion. Lee Brewster, the white drag queen and founder of the Queens Liberation Front, jumped onstage with Sylvia in solidarity.

Randy Wicker, the white middle-class Mattachine Society veteran and Gay Activists Alliance organizer, was already in Marsha P. Johnson’s orbit. From 1980 until she died in 1992, Marsha and Randy lived together in Hoboken. He called her “the greatest thing that happened to me in my life,” financed the documentary Pay It No Mind about her, and, after Marsha died, organized the Demand Justice petition that pushed the NYPD to reclassify her death from suicide to drowning of undetermined cause.

Trans women kept marching at the New York City Pride parade through the 1970s, the 1980s, and beyond, often welcomed at the front of the line by the white gay men who had picked up Sylvia and Marsha’s organizing torch.

That is the unity story. Some gay people tried to throw trans people under the bus in 1973. Other gay people refused to.

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The refusers won. Sound familiar?

Trans people kept showing up. In March 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power was founded at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center on West 13th Street in Manhattan, following Larry Kramer’s speech. The Smithsonian lists Marsha P. Johnson as a member of ACT UP, alongside her work with STAR and the Gay Liberation Front.

Read that again. The trans woman whom one faction had tried to write out of the story was, in fact, fighting alongside dying gay men at the moment when no respectable establishment would touch them.

ACT UP turned out to be one of the most effective protest movements in American medical history, forcing changes in FDA drug approval and Medicaid coverage.

God’s Love We Deliver, founded in 1985 in New York after hospice volunteer Ganga Stone visited a man with AIDS who could no longer cook for himself, has now delivered over 40 million medically tailored meals. The volunteers came from all over Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. Chelsea was already absorbing the gay community that Greenwich Village rents had pushed out. The Upper West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, the East Village, and Brooklyn. They all showed up, queer and straight, to a New York City that was responding to AIDS as one community, not separate constituencies.

We were never separate. We were always one community.

And in Britain? Miners and queers, together

The Stonewall charity was founded in 1989 to fight Section 28, the British law that prohibited local councils from “promoting” homosexuality (Stonewall, 2026). The fight against Section 28 succeeded in part since miners and queer people learned to see each other as comrades in the same fight against Margaret Thatcher’s government.

Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) was founded in July 1984 by two gay socialists, Mark Ashton and Mike Jackson, after they passed buckets at London Pride to collect strike funds. The original London group raised about £22,500, equivalent to around £70,000 today, for striking miners and their families.

The miners reciprocated.

The National Union of Mineworkers carried a block vote at the 1985 Labor Party conference in support of lesbian and gay rights. NUM lodges marched at the front of the 1985 London Pride parade. When Mark Ashton died of an AIDS-related illness in February 1987, miners attended his funeral with banners and a band.

That is what a coalition looks like. That is what the British Stonewall charity inherited.

Here is where I land

The new chair of the Stonewall charity has since apologized after four days of public outrage, and clarified that “trans inclusion is at the heart of Stonewall’s strategy.” Good. Let her now demonstrate that. Let the strategy match the name on the door.

To my lesbian, gay, and bisexual friends who are scared right now: I see you. The right wing is coming for same-sex marriage. They are coming for the repeal of sodomy laws. They are coming to see whether you can adopt a child. They were coming for those things before any trans panic started. They will keep coming whether or not you sacrifice trans people on the altar.

The right wing does not become satisfied. It learns that fragmentation is a viable strategy. Then it comes back for more.

James Finn at the Prism & Pen Medium publication put out a writer’s prompt this month asking lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans writers to tell stories of unity (Finn, 2026). I am answering with the only stories I have. The ones from the historical record above. And the ones from my home office here in Sioux Falls.

So tell yours.

Tell the story of your bisexual aunt who marched at Pride for you when you transitioned. Tell the story of the gay man on your church’s social justice committee who showed up to county commission meetings when you were too tired. Tell the story of the lesbian who wrote you a letter when your insurance dropped your hormone coverage. Tell the story of the queer board you serve on, whose first vote was to keep trans youth in the youth program.

Then live them louder than any new chair can apologize her way around.

Stonewall was always trans, too. It was always lesbian, too. Always gay, too. Always bisexual, too. The name on the door is a riot. The riot was all of us.

Let’s act like it.

Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher, MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and AI, professional musician, gymnastics coach, and queer transgender woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Find more of her writing at graceannhansen.medium.com.

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