While gay marriage was the fight of the 2010s, bathroom access is the trans fight of the 2020s. This wedge issue rarely affects cisgender gay people, highlighting a fracture in the LGBTQ coalition. Cis LGB individuals may enjoy legal marriage equality but can walk past trans protesters fighting to use a public restroom without being arrested.

While sharing a history of marginalization with LGB individuals, the trans community faces specific, often more visceral forms of oppression that intersect with, but are distinct from, homophobia.

Marsha P. Johnson (a self-identified drag queen and trans activist) and Sylvia Rivera (a Venezuelan-Puerto Rican trans woman) were on the front lines. They threw the first bricks, resisting police brutality in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Despite this, in the immediate aftermath, the mainstream gay rights movement marginalized trans voices.

For decades, the "LGBT" alliance was strategic. Gay men and lesbians needed numbers, and trans people needed safety. But the alliance was often uneasy. In the 1970s and 80s, some lesbian feminist groups, notably the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, excluded trans women, labeling them as "male infiltrators." This schism, known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERFism), remains a painful scar in LGBTQ culture.

Today, the pendulum has swung toward inclusion, but the history of erasure informs the current call for "transgender visibility" within the larger Pride movement.