The Quest for Transgender Equality - NYTimes.com

A generation ago, transgender Americans were widely regarded as deviants, unfit for dignified workplaces, a disgrace for families. Those who confided in relatives were, by and large, pitied and shunned. For most, transitioning on the job was tantamount to career suicide. Medical procedures to align a person’s body with that person’s gender identity — an internal sense of being male, female or something else — were a fringe specialty, available only to a few who paid out of pocket.

Coming out meant going through life as a pariah.

Being transgender today remains unreasonably and unnecessarily hard. But it is far from hopeless. More Americans who have wrestled with gender identity are transitioning openly, propelling a civil rights movement that has struggled even as gays and lesbians have reached irreversible momentum in their fight for equality. Those coming out now are doing so with trepidation, realizing that while pockets of tolerance are expanding, discriminatory policies and hostile, uninformed attitudes remain widespread.

They deserve to come out in a nation where stories of compassion and support vastly outnumber those that end with a suicide note. The tide is shifting, but far too slowly, while lives, careers and dreams hang in the balance.

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 Three years before a police raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York in June 1969 galvanized the gay rights movement in America, transgender women rioted after being expelled from Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. The restaurant had become one of the few safe gathering spots for the city’s community of transgender people, who at the time were not welcome at gay bars. That same year, physician Harry Benjamin published “The Transsexual Phenomenon,” a groundbreaking book that outlined how transgender people could transition medically. The two developments helped give rise to an arduous fight for societal acceptance.

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 President Obama has advanced transgender rights more than any American president. But there is a glaring form of discrimination that he has the power to end. The Pentagon continues to ban openly transgender people from joining the military, even though many of America’s closest allies have integrated them seamlessly in recent years.

The Quest for Transgender Equality - NYTimes.com