In the ’70s, Gay Rights Activists Abandoned their Trans Siblings by KQED Trans Bay
There was a growing split in the early 1970s between GLB communities and transgender people as GLB people sought respectability politics, with gay marriage as especially emblematic.
In 1973 […] two dueling Pride events sought to engage LGBT audiences — a trans-inclusive event organized by Reverend Ray Broshears, a preacher and militant gay activist, and one organized by lesbian separatists and conservative gay men that explicitly told trans people to stay away. It was the latter event that would go on to become the annual San Francisco Pride Parade.
A 1977 flyer calling for gay women to dress and present respectably, denouncing “transvestites”:
The majority of gays are upstanding citizens and business owners who have suffered too long from the adverse publicity caused by a small group of transvestites, nudists, and other weirdos who claim to be gay.
Largest Trans Survey Ever: Top Reason Trans People Stop Transitioning Is Transphobia by Erin In The Morning (June 2025)
Find the report at USTransSurvey.org and download the 2022 Health and Wellbeing Report which is the full report published June 2025.
Over 84,000 trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people aged 18 and up responded to the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, spearheaded by Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE). Of respondents who had transitioned, 9 percent had gone back to living as their sex assigned at birth at some point in their lives, at least for a short while — but in almost every single case, the reason was anti-trans discrimination from one’s family, friends, or community.
“Only 4% of people who went back to living in their sex assigned at birth for a while cited that their reason was because they realized that gender transition was not for them. When considering all respondents who had transitioned, this number equates to only 0.36%.”
Meanwhile, respondents who received gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) or gender-affirming surgery overwhelmingly reported feeling “more satisfied” with their lives, 98 percent and 97 percent, respectively.
The survey has been released in increments as researchers at A4TE wade through the unprecedented amounts of data from trans people who lent their voice to the project.
A Massive Study of 16,000 Participants in 23 Countries Finds People Are More Prejudiced Against Trans Women Than Trans Men by Devon Price (November 2024)
Original research article: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Prejudice Against Transgender People
Based on those findings, Napier suggests that in her study, trans women might be found to face stronger prejudice than trans men — but not because they are women, or because transphobia intersects with misogyny to create a novel form of prejudice called transmisogyny (a term that is not used once the entire article). No, Napier suggests that subjects in her study might be more biased against trans women because they really view trans women as akin to gay men, and gay men are more heavily discriminated against.
In the most simple form of her analyses, Napier finds that people report greater dislike for trans women (compared to trans men) in China, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, France, Italy, Poland, and the United States. The size of this effect is more pronounced in the non-Western countries listed than the Western ones. This runs counter to Napier’s prediction that people would be biased against trans men and trans women equally.
Perhaps on account of rising transphobic rhetoric, a sizeable number of young people in Western countries support gays but strongly dislike trans people.
In other words, transphobia isn’t just the result of homophobic people applying their bigotry to all members of the LGBTQ umbrella equally — rather, transphobia reflects, in some part, a person’s ideology about what gender is and whether it is changeable.