Tag: Queer history

This post was prompted by a Substack account literally named “LGBWithoutTheT.”

I wasn’t going to say anything. Then I remembered who threw the first brick. People quickly forget the hands that built their liberation.

Consider this a journal entry, a call-out, and a refusal to be erased.

And for the ones who keep trying to correct me about Marsha P. Johnson. Yes, she was a drag queen. But don’t weaponize that title to strip her of her womanhood or her role in our lineage. You say it like it means she wasn’t trans, like that disqualifies her from this fight.

Let me remind you: they didn’t make names for us back then. We weren’t supposed to exist, they lumped us in boxes for sexual orientations and forgot about gender. So excuse her for only fitting in the box allotted.

They didn’t have the language because they didn’t want us to exist. DUH! They could no longer deny the “sexual orientation” aspect. That is why we always fight together. Yet, some still find it hard to see how we ended up together.

You really think they were out here making neat little identity labels for people they were trying to erase entirely? They shoved us in boxes with the rest of the “undesirables” called us faggots, trannies, freaks, perverts, criminals, and left it at that. We weren’t given nuance because they weren’t interested in letting us live long enough to need it.

They forced us into the same box as the cis gay and lesbian community. Even then, we still fought for you. We stood beside you when no one else would. We understood oppression, and still do. I, for one, know how it moves, how it mutates, how it devours the most vulnerable first.

Still, when it’s time to return that solidarity, a lot of you disappear. You go quiet. Or worse, you join in.

I don’t see many of you showing up when it actually counts… not even for yourselves…. When there’s no parade, no post, no performance, and nothing in it for you. That’s the difference between LGBT & queer, we show up for others you all just show up for beer.

And to be clear, this isn’t an attack on the LGB community as a whole. I do know most of y’all aren’t the ones trying to cut the T off the end of the alphabet. However, bisexual folks have also been erased, belittled, and pushed out of both straight and queer spaces. You know the feeling of being treated like a phase. You understand when you’re seen as a joke. It’s familiar to be considered a threat to the comfort of others. So please consider that when you are transphobic.

This is about the ones who align themselves with exclusion once it starts to advantage them. The ones who climb out of the struggle and turn around to shut the door behind them. It’s not about whom you’re attracted to but, who you’re willing to throw under the bus. Sadly, to feel more palatable to people who never wanted any of us around in the first place. Remember that before you try to put your boots on our necks.

The “LGB without the T” movement is not only a slap in the face. You spit on the memory of our history. Look! There goes the ungrateful child pretending to have raised themselves. We know whose hand was held through the storm. We saw who clothed, fed, and got them safely to where they stand now. It’s galling. The way some cisgender community members will proudly wave rainbow flags and say “We’re finally free.” Wholeheartedly, leaving behind the people who took the first swing at their oppressors. It is cowardice dressed up as “purity politics.” It is erasure in eyeliner and eyeliner in erasure.

You do not get to rewrite history because you’re uncomfortable with the mirror trans people hold up to your face. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman, was on the front lines at Stonewall. And not to become a sanitized footnote in your cis-centric, whitewashed retelling. Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman, was screamed at and booed by cis gays when she dared to stand onstage. She told them the truth: trans people were dying while they were sipping cocktails in their freshly legal bars.

The first bricks thrown at Stonewall weren’t chucked by some white suburban gay couple who just wanted to get married. ALso not sorry we never wanted to blend in. They were thrown by trans women of color, by drag queens, by homeless youth, the “too political,” and “too much.” Your comfort was built on our chaos. Your legal rights were carved out of our blood. The very idea of “Pride” was born from our refusal to die quietly. You do not get to inherit our revolution and then evict us from it.

It’s not just historical revision, it’s betrayal. Newsflash, it’s not new. The movement gets close to acceptance, cis LGB folks try to cut the T loose. Like we’re some inconvenient asterisk instead of the architects of your liberation. You wanted our rage when it was marketable and our defiance when it made you feel brave. Yet, now you don’t want our truth when it challenges your false comfort. You want our fashion, our language, our style, our slang, but not our struggle.

Let’s be honest, a lot of you didn’t just forget us. You actively turned your backs. You watched the same system that once crushed you now turn on us, and you looked away. You even joined in, parroting right-wing points like “biological reality” or “just protecting the children.” Without the slightest trace of irony. As if they won’t come for you next. As if they didn’t already.

You try to frame this as a boundary, some protective line drawn around “just LGB issues.” But how can you talk about queerness and not talk about gender? Do you think homophobia just pops up in a vacuum? Don’t you see how much of it is rooted in the fear of people who deviate from gender norms? Effeminate men, masculine women, people who don’t “perform” their gender in a way that straight society deems appropriate? The line between “too gay” and “too trans” is razor-thin and violently enforced. You think they only care who you sleep with, but they care how you walk, talk, and dress. How you take up THEIR space.

And let’s not even pretend this movement is about safety. Nothing makes a space safer than removing the people who’ve been targeted the most, right? Trans people are not the danger. We are the canaries in the coal mine. When our rights start to fall, yours are already next in line. If you think throwing us under the bus will delay the fascists at your door… wrong and next are both words describing you.

So let me say it plain, in a way even the “respectability gays” can’t misinterpret:

You did not build this alone.
You do not get to gatekeep the house we all bled to build.
And you sure as hell don’t get to evict us and redecorate in rainbow pastels.

You are not the only letters that matter. They never were. You only got here because of the ones you now try to cut off the end like a typo. But we are not a mistake. We are not your footnote. We are the reason you get to pretend that’s your flag in the first place.

So if you’re uncomfortable, GOOD. That’s fine. Be uncomfortable. Sit with it. But don’t you dare rewrite the story, and don’t you dare call it unity when you mean uniformity.

Keep it cute. Put it on mute.
Or better yet, keep it honest. Remember who threw the first brick so you could afford to forget it.

This isn’t a debate. It’s a reckoning.

To every trans person reading this: we were never the problem. We are the reason there’s anything to celebrate at all.

To the LGB folks cutting us out:

You can’t take the T out of bigot.

And you sure as hell can’t scrub away the stain it leaves behind.