Transgender rights movement

The transgender rights movement is a movement to promote the legal status of transgender people and to eliminate discrimination and violence against transgender people regarding housing, employment, public accommodations, education, and health care. It is part of the broader LGBTQ rights movements.

Where they exist, legally enshrined anti-discrimination protections, and protections against targeted hate crimes, have been described as significant successes of the transgender rights movement. Another key goal of transgender activism is to allow changes to identification documents to recognize a person's current gender identity without the need for gender-affirming surgery or any medical requirements, which is known as gender self-identification. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) argues that legal gender recognition should be provided by states, in part because not doing so "hinders access to rights and services (e.g. education, employment, bathrooms) and puts trans people at risk of violence (e.g. when presenting documents that don't match their appearance)." The European Court of Justice ruled that states should legally recognize a person's gender without invasive or excessive requirements, and the Supreme Court of Japan ruled that forced sterilization cannot be required.

Human rights experts argue that transgender rights can be derived from universal human rights. The group Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights successfully argued that transgender people have the right to life under the American Convention on Human Rights. The right to security of person has been applied to transgender rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Other universal rights applied to transgender rights have included freedom of expression via the Yogyakarta Principles, freedom from discrimination under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the right to dignity.

Identifying the boundaries of a trans movement has been a matter of some debate. Conventionally, evidence of a codified political identity emerges in 1952, when Virginia Prince, a trans woman, along with others, launched Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. This publication is considered by some to be the beginning of the transgender rights movement in the United States, however, it would be many years before the term "transgender" itself would come into common usage.

In the years before the June 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, other actions for LGBT rights had taken place.

An early but not widely known action is the Cooper Do-nuts Riot of 1959 that took place in Downtown Los Angeles, California, when drag queens, lesbians, gay men, and transgender people who hung out at Cooper Do-nuts and who were frequently harassed by the LAPD fought back after police arrested three people, including John Rechy. Patrons began pelting the police with donuts and coffee cups. The LAPD called for backup and arrested several rioters. Rechy and the other two original detainees were able to escape.

In August 1966, the Compton's Cafeteria riot occurred in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, California. This incident was one of the first recorded LGBT-related riots in United States history. In an incident similar to Cooper's, drag queens, prostitutes, and trans people fought back against police harassment. When a transgender woman resisted arrest by throwing coffee at a police officer, drag queens poured into the streets, fighting back with their high heels and heavy bags. The next night, the regular patrons were joined by street hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBT community in their stand against police violence. It marked the beginning of trans activism in San Francisco.

In 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots, the term transgender was not yet in use. But gender nonconforming people like drag king Stormé DeLarverie, and self-identified "street queen" Marsha P. Johnson were in the vanguard of the riots, with DeLarverie widely believed to be the person whose struggle with the police was the spark that set the crowd to fight back. Witnesses to the uprising also place early trans activists and members of the Gay Liberation Front, Zazu Nova and Jackie Hormona along with Johnson, as combatants "in the vanguard" of the pushback against the police on the multiple nights of the rebellion.