LGB minus TQ+: What the dividing-the-coalition argument actually does.
A queer transgender researcher reads the "LGB Drop the T" argument against the historical record. The receipts do not look good for the people holding the megaphone.
The image arrived on a Tuesday. A well-meaning friend wanted to know what I thought.
Pink-and-blue gradient. All caps. The usual.
The most homophobic movement in history is the TQA+, but they need the LGB as a shield even though the TQA+ DON’T BELIEVE ANYONE CAN BE SAME SEX ATTRACTED, ONLY BORN IN THE WRONG BODY... The TQA+ just stole their movement; the TQA+ never fought for anything. They are thieves.
I am a queer transgender woman. I am also a graduate student who reads footnotes for fun. So I sat down with the claim, opened the archives, and worked through it.
The receipts do not match the image.
This is not a fringe meme. It is the compressed version of an argument anchored by the LGB Alliance in the UK, by the Women’s Liberation Front in the US, and by every gender-critical commentator from Helen Joyce to Kathleen Stock to J.K. Rowling. It is the rhetorical engine behind hundreds of state legislative bills. It is the talking-points memo that the Heritage Foundation recycles at panel after panel.
So let me show my work.
People threw the first brick, and the image is now trying to expel.
Three years before Stonewall, in August 1966, the drag queens and trans women at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin threw the first sugar shakers and the first cup of hot coffee.
Compton’s was a 24-hour diner where trans women and drag queens went after they were turned away from the gay bars that did not want them. The San Francisco Police Department arrested them on charges like “female impersonation” and “obstructing the sidewalk.”
One August night, when an officer tried to drag a trans woman out of a booth, she threw her coffee in his face. The patrons fought back. Plate-glass windows broke. The riot spilled out onto Turk Street.
Three years later, on June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn at 51-53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. The patrons fought back again. The people at the front of the crowd that night, according to the National Park Service at the Stonewall National Monument, included Marsha P. Johnson, a Black self-described drag queen; Sylvia Rivera, a Puerto Rican and Venezuelan trans street kid; and Stormé DeLarverie, a mixed-race butch lesbian whose arrest is widely credited with triggering the initial eruption.
A Black drag queen. A Puerto Rican trans street kid. A Black butch lesbian.
That is the founding scene of the modern American LGBTQ+ movement. Trans and gender-nonconforming people did not arrive late. They were the first ones in the room.
Sylvia Rivera literally lost her apartment fighting for gay liberation.
In the summer of 1970, eighteen months after Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). STAR House on East 12th Street was a shelter for homeless drag queens, trans women, and street kids. They funded it through donations and through the sex work Rivera and Johnson were doing themselves.
Three years later, on June 24, 1973, Rivera took the stage at the Fourth Annual Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in Washington Square Park. She was 21 years old. The mainstream gay leaders, including Jean O’Leary’s anti-trans Lesbian Feminist Liberation faction, had tried to keep her off the program.
She took the microphone anyway. The crowd booed. She spoke through the booing.
Y’all better quiet down. I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them. Have you ever been beaten up, raped, and jailed?... I have lost my apartment for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way?
The full transcript is on the Internet Archive. It is one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century trans activism. It is also the first formal public break between the trans and mainstream gay communities, and Rivera did not initiate the break. It was initiated by the program participants who tried to silence her.
Rivera did not walk away from the gay community. The gay community tried to walk away from her, and she refused to be walked away from. She kept fighting for gay rights, in coalition with people who were trying to expel her, until she died on February 19, 2002 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. Her partner, Julia Murray, was at her side. In her final hours, she was meeting with delegates from the Empire State Pride Agenda about a New York anti-discrimination bill from which trans people had been cut.
She lost her apartment for gay liberation. She kept the receipts. She is still right.
The trans community invented the gay trans man.
The image claims trans people deny that anyone can be same-sex attracted.
Lou Sullivan (1951-1991) is the recipient of that argument.
Sullivan was a trans man from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He moved to San Francisco in 1975 to seek gender-affirming care. The Stanford gender clinic rejected him for identifying as gay and intended to live as a gay man after transition. The clinic’s protocols at the time assumed that the purpose of transition was to produce a heterosexual citizen.
He spent fifteen years fighting that protocol. He founded FTM International in 1986. He helped found the GLBT Historical Society. He lobbied the American Psychiatric Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to recognize that sexual orientation and gender identity are different things.
He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. He wrote in his journal: “[They] said I couldn’t live as a gay man, but it looks like I’m going to die like one.”
He died in 1991. His diaries, We Both Laughed in Pleasure, were published by Nightboat Books in 2019.
Sullivan’s whole life is a refutation of the idea that trans people deny same-sex attraction. He built the concept of the gay trans man into medical practice against the explicit resistance of the medical establishment. The trans community did not invent same-sex attraction denial. The trans community ended it.
And the demographic data backs him up. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 27,715 respondents, found that only a minority of trans adults identified as heterosexual. The 2022 USTS, released in 2024, confirms it. Most trans people are also gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, or some combination thereof. The population the image attacks as homophobic is, by a large margin, a sexual-minority population.
The “Drop the T” movement is younger than my smartphone.
In November 2015, an anonymous user named “Drop the T” posted a Change.org petition asking GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and Lambda Legal to separate trans rights from lesbian and gay rights.
It collected about 1,500 signatures. GLAAD, HRC, Lambda Legal, and The Advocate all rejected it within 48 hours. A counter-petition collected nearly 3,000 signatures within days.
That should have been the end. It was not. Four years later, on October 22, 2019, a group of campaigners met at Conway Hall in London and turned the rhetoric into an institution: the LGB Alliance. Founders Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark, and Ann Sinnott. The UK Charity Commission registered it as a charity on April 20, 2021.
The trans youth charity Mermaids appealed the registration. The First-tier Tribunal heard evidence over seven days in September and November 2022. On July 6, 2023, Judges Lynn Griffin and Joseph Neville dismissed the appeal because Mermaids lacked legal standing to bring it. The two judges could not agree on the substantive question of whether the LGB Alliance actually meets the test for charitable status. They simply did not rule on it.
The LGB Alliance is six years old. It exists in opposition to Stonewall UK, which has been the country’s leading LGBTQ+ charity since Ian McKellen and Michael Cashman co-founded it in 1989 to fight Section 28. The original Stonewall coalition built the gay rights infrastructure in the UK. The LGB Alliance is the secessionist organization that broke off from it in 2019.
Six years. Younger than my iPhone.
