Lesbian bars and gay bathhouses, historic havens, have faced difficult internal debates about who belongs. A minority of cisgender lesbians (often labeled TERFs—Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) argue that trans women are male-bodied interlopers. This faction is statistically tiny but media-loud. In response, most LGBTQ culture has firmly moved to a "trans women are women; trans men are men" policy.

In the summer of 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village, it was not cisgender gay men alone who threw the first bricks. It was transgender women of color—specifically Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—who catalyzed a riot that would ignite the modern gay rights movement. For decades, the story of that night was sanitized, but the truth remains unshakeable: