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While united in the fight for liberation, the transgender community and the broader LGB community have distinct cultures, challenges, and lived experiences.

The relationship has not always been harmonious. A painful history of transmisogyny and transphobia exists within some corners of LGB communities.

The dominant response from mainstream LGBTQ+ culture, however, has been one of solidarity: "No one is free until we are all free."

To reduce the trans experience to struggle is to miss its vibrant, creative soul. Contemporary trans culture is flourishing in art, literature, music, and social media.

Popular history often credits the 1969 Stonewall Riots—led by drag queens, gay men, and lesbians—as the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. But a more accurate history acknowledges that transgender women of color, particularly Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were on the front lines. Rivera, a trans woman, famously had to fight to be included in the early Gay Liberation Front, which she felt focused too narrowly on middle-class gay men and lesbians while ignoring homeless queer youth and trans people.

But before Stonewall, there was Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco (1966), where trans women and drag queens fought back against police harassment. These events reveal a critical truth: trans people have always been at the center of queer resistance.

For decades, the "LGBT" alliance was a strategic and survival-based one. In a world that pathologized all forms of gender and sexual deviance, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people shared the same dark bars, the same police brutality, and the same medical discrimination (homosexuality was a mental disorder until 1973; gender identity disorder remained until 2013). The alliance was born of necessity: safety in numbers.