The Origins and Development of the National Transgender Rights Movement in the United States of America

Abstract This article examines the emergence of a national transgender rights movement in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing on newly available materials from the Trans Equality Archive at the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington, DC, this study shows that the transgender movement has been neither wholly independent of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement, nor simply a subdivision of it. Through a process of hybridization, the transgender movement became simultaneously its own independent movement and a constituent of the LGBT movement. In building this argument, this article tells an untold story about the history of the movement. First, I narrate the emergence of a shared transgender collective identity separate from LGB identity. Second, I describe the burgeoning of a transgender movement and detail its continued distinction from the LGB movement. Third, I explain how the transgender movement pushed to turn the “LGB” movement into the “LGBT” movement, while still maintaining its independence. The article sheds light on the complex dynamics of contention among national advocacy organizations that gave shape to the contemporary transgender rights movement. It also contributes to the scholarship by tracing the distinctive evolution of the national transgender movement, which has operated alongside grassroots trans movements.