Stonewall Equality Limited, trading as Stonewall, is a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights charity in the United Kingdom. It is the largest LGBT rights organisation in Europe.
Stephen Thomas Whittle, is a British legal scholar and activist with the transgender activist group Press for Change. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Equalities Law in the School of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Between 2007 and 2009, he was president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Having been assigned female at birth, he is described as "a radical lesbian before his sex change and now a leading commentator on gender issues", who after the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force in April 2005, achieved legal recognition as a man and so was able to marry his female partner.
Open Door is a programme produced by the BBC's Community Programme Unit. It was first broadcast on 2 April 1973 and ran for a decade until September 1983. The programme gave people brief control of transmission and was a platform for the public to talk about its own issues and give their own views without editorial input from the BBC. The programme was later replaced by Open Space.
LGBT movements in the United States comprise an interwoven history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and allied social movements in the United States of America, beginning in the early 20th century. A commonly stated goal among these movements is social equality for LGBT people. Some have also focused on building LGBT communities or worked towards liberation for the broader society from biphobia, homophobia, and transphobia. LGBT movements organized today are made up of a wide range of political activism and cultural activity, including lobbying, street marches, social groups, media, art, and research. Sociologist Mary Bernstein writes: "For the lesbian and gay movement, then, cultural goals include challenging dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, homophobia, and the primacy of the gendered heterosexual nuclear family (heteronormativity). Political goals include changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm." Bernstein emphasizes that activists seek both types of goals in both the civil and political spheres.
A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. Some transgender people who desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another identify as transsexual. Transgender is also an umbrella term; in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex, it may also include people who are non-binary or genderqueer. Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a third gender, or else conceptualize transgender people as a third gender. The term may also include cross-dressers or drag kings and drag queens in some contexts. The term transgender does not have a universally accepted definition, including among researchers.
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. A major goal of transgender activism is to allow changes to identification documents to conform with a person's current gender identity without the need for gender-affirming surgery or any medical requirements, which is known as gender self-identification. It is part of the broader LGBT rights movements.
This article addresses the history of transgender people in the United States from prior to Western contact until the present. There are a few historical accounts of transgender people that have been present in the land now known as the United States at least since the early 1600s. Before Western contact, some Native American tribes had third gender people whose social roles varied from tribe to tribe. People dressing and living differently from the gender roles typical of their sex assigned at birth and contributing to various aspects of American history and culture have been documented from the 17th century to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, advances in gender-affirming surgery as well as transgender activism have influenced transgender life and the popular perception of transgender people in the United States.
Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely.
Paris Lees is an English author, journalist, presenter and campaigner. She topped The Independent on Sunday's 2013 Pink List, came second in the 2014 Rainbow List, and was awarded the Positive Role Model Award for LGBT in the 2012 National Diversity Awards. Lees is the first trans columnist at Vogue and was the first trans woman to present shows on BBC Radio 1 and Channel 4. Her first book, What It Feels Like For a Girl, was published by Penguin in 2021.
My Transsexual Summer is a British documentary-style reality series about seven transgender people in different stages of transition. For five weekends in the summer of 2011, they stay together in a large holiday home in Bedfordshire, where they meet and help each other with some of the struggles that transgender people face. Between these weekend retreats, they go back to their lives and real-world challenges.
Lily Madigan is an activist within the British Labour Party. She was the first openly trans woman to hold the position of Constituency Labour Party Women's Officer, having been elected in November 2017 by the Labour Party in the constituency Rochester and Strood. Madigan's election as a Women's Officer was controversial within the Labour Party. A complaint by Madigan alleging transphobia against women's officer Anne Ruzylo was not upheld, but led Ruzylo to stand down. In 2019, Madigan was elected the national women's officer for Labour Students.
The LGBT community in London is one of the largest within Europe. LGBT culture of London, England, is centred on Old Compton Street in Soho. There are also LGBT pubs and restaurants across London in Haggerston, Dalston and Vauxhall.
Within Christianity, there are a variety of views on the issues of gender identity and transgender people. Christian denominations vary in their official position: some explicitly support gender transition, some oppose it, and others are divided or have not taken an official stance. Within any given denomination, individual members may or may not endorse the official views of their church on the topic.
Accounts of transgender people have been identified going back to ancient times in cultures worldwide. The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.
Transgender rights in the United Kingdom have varied significantly over time, with transgender Britons facing many issues not experienced by non-trans individuals. These include various laws and public attitudes in regards to identity documents, as well as anti-discrimination measures used by or pertaining to transgender people, in the areas of employment, education, housing and social services, amongst others.
The following is a timeline of transgender history. Transgender history dates back to the first recorded instances of transgender individuals in ancient civilizations. However, the word transgenderism did not exist until 1965 when coined by psychiatrist John F. Oliven of Columbia University in his 1965 reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology; the timeline includes events and personalities that may be viewed as transgender in the broadest sense, including third gender and other gender-variant behavior, including ancient or modern precursors from the historical record.
The LGB Alliance is a British advocacy group and registered charity founded in 2019 in opposition to the policies of LGBT rights charity Stonewall on transgender issues. Its founders are Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark and Ann Sinnott. The organisation has said that lesbians are facing "extinction" because of the "disproportionate" focus on transgender identities in schools.
Woman's Place UK (WPUK) is a British political advocacy group founded in 2017. The group is opposed to gender self-identification for transgender people in the UK, and has advocated restricting access to women-only spaces on the basis of "sex, not gender".
Angela Lynn Douglas was an American transgender activist and singer. She was a transgender woman who performed as a rock musician and was a prominent pioneering figure in transsexual activism during the 1970s. She founded the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO), the first international trans organization. She wrote articles about the state of trans politics at the time for the Berkeley Barb, The Advocate, the Bay Area Reporter, Come Out! and Everywoman, in addition to TAO's Mirage magazine and Moonshadow Bulletin. She expressed racist attitudes at various points in her life, and at one point became active with the Nazi party.
Transvestism and Transsexualism in Modern Society, also known as The First National TV.TS Conference, was a conference held in Leeds, England, from 15 to 17 March 1974. It was the first such event to be organised by members of the community. With an educational remit, the conference sought to further understanding of issues faced by transvestites and trans women.
