The future of is inherently trans-inclusive or it is nothing. Young people today are increasingly identifying outside the gender binary; a 2025 Pew Research study found that over 40% of Gen Z LGBTQ adults identify as transgender or non-binary. They are not the future of the movement—they are the present.

The transgender community and LGBTQ culture have a rich and complex history. The modern LGBTQ rights movement began in the 1950s and 1960s, with the Stonewall riots in 1969 marking a pivotal moment in the fight for LGBTQ rights. The transgender community, in particular, has faced significant challenges and marginalization, including being excluded from many LGBTQ spaces and events.

The foundational link between the transgender community and the broader LGBTQ movement is historical and strategic. The modern fight for queer liberation did not begin at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 with a tidy separation of “gay rights” from “trans rights.” The uprising was led by marginalized figures at the intersection of multiple struggles: Marsha P. Johnson, a self-identified transvestite and gay drag queen, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman and co-founder of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). These were not gay men fighting for the right to marry; they were gender-nonconforming people of color fighting for the right to exist on the streets without being arrested or brutalized. For decades, trans women and drag queens were the frontline soldiers in police skirmishes, the ones most visible and most vulnerable. In this crucible, the alliance was not a political calculation but a survival necessity. The same laws that criminalized same-sex intimacy also criminalized “impersonating a woman” (masquerade laws), meaning a gay man in a leather jacket and a trans woman in a dress were both targets of the same state-sanctioned violence. This shared enemy—the police, the church, the medical establishment, the normative family—forged an unbreakable, if imperfect, alliance.