Portal Transgender

The Compton's Cafeteria Riot occurred in August 1966 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. This incident was one of the first recorded LGBT-related riots in United States history, along with the Cooper Do-nuts Riot, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. It marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco.

The 1960s was a critical time period for sexual, gender, and ethnic minorities—social movements which honed in on civil rights and sexual liberation came into fruition, and even churches, like the Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco, began reaching out to the transgender community. Still, many police officers resisted this change and continued to abuse and ostracize transgender people. This simultaneous rise in support for transgender rights on one side, and the unwillingness to accept these new ideas on the other, created the strain that would fuel the riot at Compton's Cafeteria in the summer of 1966, in which a transgender woman resisted arrest by throwing coffee at a police officer and drag queens poured into the streets, fighting back with their high heels and heavy bags.

Leelah Alcorn (November 15, 1997 – December 28, 2014) was an American transgender girl whose suicide attracted international attention. Alcorn had posted a suicide note to her Tumblr blog, writing about societal standards affecting transgender people and expressing the hope that her death would create a dialogue about discrimination, abuse and lack of support for transgender people.

Assigned male at birth, she was given the name Joshua Alcorn and raised in Ohio by a family affiliated with the Churches of Christ movement. At age 14, she came out as transgender to her parents, Carla and Doug Alcorn, who refused to accept her female gender identity. When she was 16, they denied her request to undergo transition treatment, instead sending her to Christian-based conversion therapy with the intention of convincing her to reject her gender identity and accept her gender as assigned at birth. After she revealed her attraction toward males to her classmates, her parents removed her from school and revoked her access to social media. In her suicide note, Alcorn cited loneliness and alienation as key reasons for her decision to end her life and blamed her parents for causing these feelings. She killed herself by walking into traffic on the Interstate 71 highway.

Alcorn arranged for her suicide note to be posted online several hours after her death, and it soon attracted international attention across mainstream and social media. LGBT rights activists called attention to the incident as evidence of the problems faced by transgender youth, while vigils were held in her memory in the United States and United Kingdom. Petitions were formed calling for the establishment of "Leelah's Law", a ban on conversion therapy in the U.S., which received a supportive response from U.S. President Barack Obama. Within a year, the city of Cincinnati criminalised conversion therapy. Alcorn's parents were criticized for misgendering Leelah in comments that they made to the media, while LGBT rights activist Dan Savage blamed them for their child's death, and social media users subjected them to online harassment. Alcorn's parents defended their refusal to accept their child's identity and their use of conversion therapy by reference to their Christian values.

• ... that trans women in Cape Verde are colloquially referred to as tchindas, named after Tchinda Andrade, the first trans woman in the country to come out publicly?
• ... that Lucy Salani is considered the only known Italian transgender person to survive the Nazi concentration camps?
• ... that by being the first travesti to become a national celebrity, entertainer Cris Miró increased the visibility of the transgender community in Argentine society during the 1990s?
• ... that after trans woman Dylan Mulvaney was sponsored by Bud Light, American conservatives boycotted the brand and its parent company Anheuser-Busch?
• ... that since 2018, IKEA's stuffed toy shark Blåhaj has become a popular Internet meme and an icon of the online transgender community?
• ... that The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes discusses the history of transgender man Ewan Forbes and his 1968 legal case to inherit his family's baronetcy that was silenced from public records?

• 10 – Jake Zyrus (1992), Filipino singer and actor
• 15 – Jackie Shane (1940–2019), American singer
• 19 – Sam Smith (1992), English non-binary singer and songwriter
• 25 – Poppy Z. Brite (1967), American author
• 25 – Cece McDonald (1989), American activist
• 26 – Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964), Irish author
• 29 – Laverne Cox (1972), American actress and transgender advocate
• 30 – Christine Jorgensen (1926–1989), American transgender woman

• ... that African-American gay and transgender youth Ali Forney, once homeless himself, had a homeless LGBT youth center in New York City named after him for his work helping other youths?
• ... that non-binary transgender actor Indya Moore became the first transgender person to be featured on the cover of the US version of Elle magazine when they were featured in May 2019?
• ... that Jennie June (b. 1874), one of the earliest transgender people to publish an autobiography in the US, published the first and second volumes in 1918 and 1922, and wrote a third volume which was discovered in 2010?

It is difficult to generate a counterdiscourse if one is programmed to disappear. The highest purpose of the medically defined transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the "normal" population as soon as possible. Part of this process is known as constructing a plausible history--learning to lie effectively about one's past. What is gained is acceptability in society. ... In the transsexual's erased history we can find a story disruptive to the accepted discourses of gender.