For most people, the struggle for gay and transgender rights are one and the same. It's the LGBT movement, not the ‘gay rights movement’.
But it wasn’t always this way. Until the 1990s, the two communities were largely separate, and it wasn’t until the 2010s that they officially joined forces.
At the time, many liberals readily embraced this alliance as a logical evolution. After all, the fight for gay rights was drawing to a close, and after same-sex marriage was secured, it seemed natural that the spotlight would shift towards another marginalized group. The term LGBT now symbolizes a united front of oppressed minorities gladly standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight for a more equal world.
But, early on, certain members of the LGB community felt there was a harmful idea at the core of the modern trans rights movement: the idea that we all possess a gender identity, separate from our biological sex, which defines whether we are men or women.
Stemming from this was the belief that heterosexual males who claim to possess a “female gender” are lesbians. Many of these biological males accused the lesbians who rejected this idea of “transphobia”.
In the eyes of these lesbians, they were once again being persecuted by the opposite sex after having largely won a decades-long struggle for the same rights as heterosexuals.
Then, the very same organizations that had fought for gay rights embraced what would become known as “gender ideology.” These groups repeated the idea that transwomen/biological males were the same as women and thus that males could be lesbians and that females could be gay men.
Eventually, these groups promoted the idea that children could be born in the wrong body and require drugs and surgeries to be their authentic selves. To top it all off, that there was to be “No debate!”
Then, two lesbian activists disagreed. Their names were Bev Jackson and Kate Harris. Both had a long history of political activism. Jackson was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, and Harris was a champion of women’s liberation. The two simply could not sit back and allow this new attack on their community to continue.
