The Forgotten Trans Activists Who Paved the Way Before Stonewall

When we talk about transgender history, the conversation often begins and ends at the Stonewall Inn, June 1969. And while Stonewall was a seismic moment, it didn't emerge from a vacuum. It was the eruption of decades of resistance, survival, and radical courage by ordinary people who had no roadmap, no movement to join, and no guarantee that anyone would remember their names.

They deserve to be remembered.

History Is Made by People, Not Pedestals

Before we meet them, it's worth asking: why does it matter how we tell these stories?

There's a persistent “Great Man” mythology in the way history gets discussed. It’s the idea that transformative change flows downward from exceptional, singular individuals. But this framework flattens the truth. As Maya Angelou observed, a hero is simply any person dedicated to making the world better. Rather than a permanent trait, heroism is a behavior: courageous, risky, sometimes unostentatious, often costly.

The trans pioneers who came before Stonewall weren't born special per se. They were born into a world that told them they did not or should not exist, and in the face of that they made choices—sometimes extraordinary ones, sometimes just the daily choice to live as themselves. Even doing just that, just existing in early 20th-century America, was an act of profound defiance for a trans person.

The Science That Made a Movement Possible

The conceptual groundwork for transgender identity as we understand it today was laid, surprisingly, over a century ago. Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician and tireless advocate for sexual minorities, published Die Transvestiten in 1910 in which he argued that many gender-nonconforming people were expressing a deep-seated identity, not a fetish or pathology. By 1923, he had introduced the concept of seelischer Transsexualismus (psychic transsexualism) to describe a profound internal need for a change of sex.

At his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, some of the first documented gender-affirming surgeries were performed for patients including Dora Richter and, later, Lili Elbe, whose story is dramatized in The Danish Girl. When Nazi-aligned students raided the Institute and burned its library in 1933, they weren't just destroying books, they were trying to erase a framework that had begun to give trans people language for their own lives.

Though, that didn't fully succeed.

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Choices

Alan Hart (1890–1962) didn't have a movement behind him. In 1917, working with physician J. Allen Gilbert in Portland, Oregon, Hart became one of the first trans men in the United States to undergo gender-affirming surgery. He went on to earn his medical degree and became a pioneering tuberculosis researcher whose mobile X-ray screening programs saved countless lives. Hart contributed enormously to public health as himself on his own terms.

Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886–1954) insisted on wearing dresses to school as a child in Kentucky. When her mother took her to a doctor out of worry, the doc simply advised letting the young Lucy live as herself. Anderson moved west, built a life as a celebrated cook and businesswoman in Ventura, California, married twice, and when prosecuted by the U.S. government for what amounted to being trans, she refused to be ashamed. Her defiance was not part of a grand strategy; it was human.

Michael Dillon (1915–1962) was the first known trans man to undergo phalloplasty, quietly navigating a medical system in 1940s Britain that barely had language for what he needed. He later earned a medical degree, helped perform the first known male-to-female surgery in Britain, and eventually became a Buddhist monk. His life of staggering range was almost entirely outside the spotlight until he was outed by a book about the genealogy of the aristocracy.

Before Stonewall, There Was Cooper Do-nuts

In 1959—a full decade before the Stonewall uprising—the patrons of Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles reached their breaking point. After years of routine police sweeps targeting trans women, drag queens, and gay men under “female impersonation” laws, the community finally fought back with coffee cups and donuts. This moment was largely erased from mainstream history, likely because those who resisted were trans people of color whose voices were systematically silenced. This resistance wasn't an isolated event. By 1966, trans women in San Francisco staged the Compton's Cafeteria Riot following similar harassment.

The Ripple Effect

From 1965 through 1969, gay and lesbian activists held the “Annual Reminder” pickets at the White House and Independence Hall. While groups like the Mattachine Society are often dismissed today as “accommodationist,” they laid some groundwork for what followed. As a trans classmate of mine once put it: “Sometimes it takes a token to start a ride!”

This is how change actually moves: not in a single seismic wave, but through a thousand smaller ripples that reshape the possible. A single riot might only earn a one-inch news blurb filled with slurs, but to a queer reader living in stealth mode, it offers a spark of recognition. It proves that others are just as tired of their common fate. Stonewall proved to be a watershed in the movement, but its success wasn't inevitable; it was a choice made repeatedly by people who had every reason to stay quiet.

Nobody Was Born Ahead of Their Time

(Anti-)comedienne and storyteller Hannah Gadsby put it pointedly in their 2018 special Nanette: “nobody is born ahead of their time.” These trans pioneers weren't visionaries floating above their era. They were products of it: shaped by its cruelties, constrained by its limitations, and responding to the conditions they actually lived in. To my mind, what made them remarkable was not that they transcended history, it's that they acted anyway.

That's a more honest and more useful way to understand them. Because it means their courage wasn't super-human. It was human. Which means it's available to the rest of us, too.

Their History Is Ours to Carry Forward

Pre-Stonewall transgender history is not a footnote. It is the foundation. Every legal protection (such that it is), every ray of visibility, every person who gets to live openly as themselves today is standing on ground that was broken by people most of us were never taught to name.

At Expanding Horizons, we believe that history belongs to everyone and that understanding where we've been is essential to protecting where we're going. Our traveling exhibits bring these stories into libraries, schools, Pride festivals, and community spaces, creating room for the kind of learning that changes people.

Ready to bring transgender history to your community? Explore our exhibits celebrating transgender history and resilience at ExpandingHorizons.LGBT/exhibits.