By Wilbur Turner, President and Executive Director
Today is Trans and Enby Pride March day in Kelowna. I’m there with a sign that reads “No 2SLGBQ Without the T.” It’s not a provocation. It’s a statement of historical fact, moral obligation, and political urgency. And honestly, it shouldn’t need to be said at all.
But it does need to be said, because there is a small and particularly noisy faction within the rainbow community itself that has decided the path to their own safety runs straight through the erasure of their trans siblings. They are wrong on the history, wrong on the strategy, and wrong on the ethics. The movement didn’t get to where it is today without trans people, and it will not survive the current assault by abandoning them now.
Let’s start at the beginning, because the revisionists would very much prefer you forget it.
The Stonewall Inn was not a respectable gathering place for the polished, assimilated gay men who would later try to claim its legacy. The most common patrons at Stonewall were drag queens, transgender people, butch lesbians, male sex workers, and homeless youth. The people who had the least to lose, because they had already lost everything society could take. When the police raided the bar in June 1969, it was those people who fought back.
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both trans women of colour, played critical roles in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, the landmark event in 2SLGBTQIA+ history sparked by police violence against queer people. Rivera was seventeen years old. Johnson, like many other transgender women, felt they had nothing to lose. They were not only angered by the police raid but also the oppression and fear they experienced every day.
The gay rights movement that emerged from Stonewall was built on the courage of people who were not its eventual beneficiaries. The Gay Activist Alliance, which formed in response to Stonewall, frequently rejected the role transgender people, the majority of whom were people of colour, had played in the uprising. Rivera also fought against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York. The pattern of using trans people as shock troops and then locking them out of the building is not new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest plays in the progressive coalition’s handbook, and it is no more defensible now than it was then.
This is the history that the “Drop the T” movement asks us to forget. In 2015, the slogan “Drop the T” was coined to encourage 2SLGBTQIA+ organizations to stop supporting transgender people. The campaign has been widely condemned by many 2SLGBTQIA+ groups as transphobic. It found more organized expression four years later when the LGB Alliance was founded in the United Kingdom. LGB Alliance claims its purpose is to see lesbians, gay men and bisexuals living free from discrimination or disadvantage based on their sexual orientation, but ever since its inception, the organization has campaigned to erode trans rights and paint the trans community as dangerous to women and children.
Most of the queer community has rejected the LGB Alliance, as it does very little to promote core 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and has even been associated with right-wing religious groups in the United States. That last detail is not a footnote. It is the entire argument in miniature.
Because here is what the trans-exclusionary voices within our community are not willing to say out loud: the people cheering them on do not actually like gay people either. The Christian nationalist movement that has driven legislative assault after legislative assault against transgender people is not making a sincere philosophical distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation. They are making a tactical decision about which target is currently easiest to hit. Many “drop the T” campaigns receive support from organizations with broader anti-2SLGBTQIA+ agendas. These attempts to divide the community serve external interests that benefit from a fractured movement.
The slurs are instructive. “Groomer.” “Pedophile.” “Leave the kids alone.” Those of us old enough to remember, or who have done the reading, recognize every single one of them. In 1977, singer Anita Bryant began spearheading the “Save Our Children” campaign, which aimed to repeal a Dade County, Florida, ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. Leveraging societal stereotypes and fears around homosexuality, her campaign framed the issue in terms of child safety, claiming that 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals posed a threat to children. These were the weapons aimed at gay and lesbian people. All of them. Not just trans people. Not just drag queens. All of us. And they worked well enough that the repeal passed by seventy percent of the vote.
The people now weaponizing identical language against trans people, with the tacit or explicit approval of some in the LGB community, are not making a novel argument rooted in genuine concern for children. They are recycling a proven attack vector against a newly isolated target. This is not the first time that children, or symbolic children, have been used by anti-2SLGBTQIA+ political campaigns to advance conservative agendas. The figure of the child has been manipulated to appeal to voters for decades. The playbook did not change. Only the target shifted.
What troubles me most is not the opponents outside our community. I expect them to be who they are. What troubles me is the small but vocal contingent of gay and lesbian people who have decided to align themselves with this movement, who comfort themselves with the idea that throwing trans people overboard will calm the waters. They have become useful symbols, trotted out by Christian nationalist organizations as evidence that the anti-trans agenda is reasonable and principled rather than bigoted. “Even some gay people agree,” the argument goes. It is the oldest trick in the minority-politics playbook: find a member of the targeted group willing to legitimize the attack, and amplify them far beyond their actual numbers or support.
They are not being listened to because their arguments are compelling. They are being amplified because they are useful. When the usefulness runs out, so will the platform.
The broader historical lesson should be obvious by now: the re-normalization of homophobia and opposition to gay rights is driven primarily by right-wing partisans and religious conservatives, and can be interpreted as part of a broader process of right-wing populist democratic backsliding that has occurred across many countries over the past decade. The same forces pursuing trans erasure are simultaneously working to unwind marriage equality, dismantle non-discrimination protections, and restore the legal and social architecture of a world where no one in the rainbow community is safe or welcome. This is not speculation. It is stated policy in documents like Project 2025 and in the floor speeches of legislators who cite the Bible to explain why they believe gender is binary and fixed.
No one gets saved by offering up the most vulnerable members of their community as a sacrifice. Not historically, not politically, not morally. The “parental rights” framing that has animated so much of the current anti-trans wave is not a sincere expression of concern for children. It is cover. The same cover that Anita Bryant gave it in 1977. The same cover that every subsequent wave of anti-2SLGBTQIA+ organizing has needed, because the actual animus, the bare desire to punish people for existing outside of a narrow heteronormative framework, is not politically viable on its own.
I walked in the Trans and Enby Pride March today because solidarity is not a sentiment. It is a practice. It is showing up with your body and your sign and your voice even when the fight is not specifically about your identity, because you understand that the fight is, in fact, always about all of us. The rainbow community was built by people who understood this. Marsha P. Johnson understood it. Sylvia Rivera understood it, even when the mainstream gay rights organizations of her era tried to shut her out of her own revolution.
No 2SLGBQ without the T. Not as a slogan. As a fact. As a commitment. As the only honest accounting of where we came from, and the only viable path through what is coming.
