Inspiriting trans* and nonbinary people

Sandy Stone born c. 1936 (age 89–90)

Stone started as a recording engineer, at Record Plant in New York and then in California, working with Mississippi John Hurt, Van Morrison, the Byrds and the Grateful Dead. Through the 1970s she was the engineer for Olivia Records, the women’s music collective, until a campaign to force her out of it for being trans succeeded.

The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, which she wrote afterwards, argued that trans* people had been endlessly written about by medicine and never allowed to write back. The price of treatment was to disappear perfectly into a new life and tell doctors the story they wanted, and that erased the only people who could describe what was happening. She told trans* people to refuse it and speak as what they are. The essay is widely regarded as the founding text of transgender studies. She went on to found the ACTLab at the University of Texas, one of the first places to teach new media as an art form.

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Photograph by Andymiah, resized, used under CC BY 3.0 — source.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland born 1944 (age 82)

Glenn-Copeland recorded Keyboard Fantasies in 1986 in rural Ontario, on a borrowed synthesiser and a drum machine. He pressed a couple of hundred cassettes and sold almost none. For most of the next thirty years he made a living writing for Sesame Street and appearing on the Canadian children’s programme Mr Dressup, which he did for twenty-five years.

A Japanese record collector found one of the cassettes in 2015, and the album was reissued. A generation of musicians now cite it, and it won the public vote for the Polaris Heritage Prize in 2020. By then he was in his seventies, and had been living publicly as a transgender man since 2002. He has since made new records, in 2023 and 2026, received an honorary doctorate, and kept up a heavy touring schedule.

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Photograph by Rene Passet, resized, used under CC BY 4.0 — source.

Kate Bornstein born 1948 (age 78)

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us came out in 1994 and argued that gender is something a culture makes, and that it does not come in two fixed boxes. Bornstein had surgery in 1986, and then found that being a woman did not feel right either: “I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man.” The book mixed theory, memoir, performance and exercises for the reader, and queer studies courses still teach it. My Gender Workbook, a book of gender-bending exercises, followed; reviewing its 2013 rewrite, Publishers Weekly said the original “has influenced an entire generation of trans writers and artists”.

Hello, Cruel World, in 2006, drew on her own experience of suicidal thoughts to offer a hundred and one alternatives to suicide for “teens, freaks, and other outlaws”. Its one rule is “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living… just don’t be mean.” Her work on suicide prevention and for at-risk youth earned her two citations from the New York City Council. She survived lung cancer diagnosed in 2012, made her Broadway debut at seventy, and uses she or they; she has said that at this point you can’t misgender her.

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Roz Kaveney born 1949 (age 77)

Kaveney started to transition in her last year at Pembroke College, Oxford, and was persuaded to stop by feminist friends. With Rachel Pollack she wrote the Gay Liberation Front’s trans manifesto, Don’t Call Me Mister You Fucking Beast, in 1972. She went to the United States to transition and did so for good in 1978 or 1979. Let down by friends there, she worked as a street hustler to survive, “this rather posh-voiced Oxford graduate on the streets of Chicago.” She was a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship, set up in 1989, and deputy chair of the human rights group Liberty.

Her books of popular-culture criticism include Reading the Vampire Slayer (2001) and Superheroes! and Teen Dreams, both from 2006. Her novel Tiny Pieces of Skull won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction in 2016. She began writing poems when many of her friends and mentors died, between about 1999 and 2008; the first was for a memorial meeting she organised for her friend Mike Ford. “Various awful things have happened to me, and I’ve developed this very dark sense of humour,” she said. “It’s gallows humour, and I love it.” Her collections include Dialectic of the Flesh and What If What’s Imagined Were All True, both published in 2012.

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Jo Clifford born c. 1950 (age 75–76)

In The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven (2009), Clifford imagined Jesus coming back to the world today as a transgender woman, and played her herself. Her Jesus preaches, retells familiar Gospel stories, and shares bread and wine with the audience. “As a practicing Christian myself,” Clifford said, “I have no interest in attacking the church,” only in asserting “that Jesus of the Gospels would not in any way wish to attack or denigrate people like myself.” Around three hundred protesters stood outside its opening in Glasgow, and the Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, condemned it. A Brazilian production starring Renata Carvalho was banned in Jundiaí, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, and kept touring anyway.

By then Clifford had been writing for the stage for decades. Losing Venice (1985) was the first of a series for Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, and she has written more than a hundred works in every dramatic medium since. She has been a transgender woman, she says, “for as long as I remember,” but transitioned only in 2006, after more than thirty years together with her wife, the writer and feminist campaigner Sue Innes. She put it another way in 2014, saying, “I have to identify myself as a woman, but actually I’m not a woman, I’m a third gender person.” She lives in Edinburgh, is “very proud to be a father, and to be a grandmother,” and in 2021 received the Writers’ Guild’s Olwen Wymark Award.

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Martine Rothblatt born 1954 (age 71–72)

A satellite lawyer, Rothblatt founded Sirius Satellite Radio in 1990. Her daughter was diagnosed in 1994 with pulmonary arterial hypertension, then effectively a death sentence, and nobody was developing a treatment because too few people had it to be worth the money. Rothblatt read the literature herself, found a compound that had been shelved, licensed it, and founded United Therapeutics in 1996 to finish the work. Her daughter lived, as have many other people with the disease.

She came out as a transgender woman the same year she started the foundation that became that company. She has since pushed United Therapeutics into xenotransplantation, arguing that the organ shortage is a manufacturing problem, and in 2022 a heart from one of the company’s genetically modified pigs was transplanted into a person for the first time. She was the highest-paid female chief executive in America in 2013.

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Christine Burns born 1954 (age 72)

When she joined Press for Change, Burns was secretary of her local Conservative Party branch, and she used her connections and letter-writing to put trans issues in front of the cabinet. She came out in 1995 so that she could chair fringe meetings at the Labour and Conservative party conferences, and became a vice-president of the campaign soon after. She helped set up its website in late 1995. She co-wrote its submission to the government’s Interdepartmental Working Group on Transsexualism, and kept in close contact with officials while the Gender Recognition Act 2004 was drafted and debated. She was among the first to receive a certificate under it.

“For most it’s been a profoundly personal thing – not something to shout about, but a piece of paper to hold, to have a little cry, and feel closure at last,” she said of the people who applied in its first year. She was appointed MBE in the 2005 New Year Honours, for services to gender issues. By her own account she wrote Trans: A Practical Guide for the NHS, which the Department of Health published in 2008 and which she describes as its first official guidance on trans health. She became the first trans patron of LGBT History Month in 2010, and in 2018 edited Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows, a history of the movement in the words of people who took part in it.

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Stephen Whittle born 1955 (age 71)

Whittle came out as a transgender man in 1974, when Britain had no mechanism to recognise it at all. He co-founded Press for Change in 1992, and within two years it was being described in the House of Lords as one of the most effective lobbying organisations in the country. It had a handful of people and no funding, and the legal position it worked against held that a trans* person remained, permanently and for every purpose, whatever their birth certificate said.

He took his own family to the European Court of Human Rights in 1996 to be recognised as his children’s father. The campaign he helped run produced the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which for the first time let trans* people in the UK correct their legal sex. He got his own birth certificate in 2005 and married his partner of twenty-six years. He is Professor of Equalities Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed OBE in 2005.

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Mary Ann Horton born 1955 (age 70)

At Berkeley, Horton was part of the team that built BSD Unix. She maintained the vi editor for years, contributed to the terminfo database, and wrote uuencode, the first tool for sending binary files by email. She co-designed the B News software that Usenet ran on and gatewayed ARPANET mailing lists into it. Through the 1980s she arranged the feeds that let new sites join, until by 1987 the network had grown to more than five thousand of them.

She worked at Lucent Technologies, and in October 1997 persuaded it to add five words to its equal opportunity policy, “gender identity, characteristics, or expression”, which made it the first large company with transgender-inclusive language in that policy. She then took on the argument that transition was too expensive to cover in company health plans, and brought the data to show it was not. The Lucent change came four years before she was living full time as Mary Ann, which she began in October 2001, after receiving Out & Equal’s Trailblazer award. Her memoir, Trailblazer, came out in 2022.

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Photograph by Mary Ann Horton, resized, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 — source.

Judith Butler born 1956 (age 70)

Gender Trouble (1990) argued that gender is not an inner essence that our behaviour expresses, but something produced through repetition, through acts, gestures and norms performed so consistently that they come to look like nature.

Butler is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, and has been legally nonbinary in California since 2020. In recent years they have been a prominent critic of the anti-gender movements organising across Europe and the Americas, most directly in their book Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), which treats those movements as a serious political project. They are Maxine Elliot Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.

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Sophie Wilson born 1957 (age 69)

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Rachel Levine born 1957 (age 68)

A paediatrician who specialised in adolescent medicine and eating disorders, Levine was Pennsylvania’s Physician General and then Health Secretary through the first year of the pandemic. The job meant standing in front of cameras daily to give unwelcome news to thirteen million people, while being mocked for being trans.

The Senate confirmed her as United States Assistant Secretary for Health in 2021; no openly trans federal official had been confirmed before. Shortly afterwards she was sworn in as a four-star admiral of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the first woman in that corps to hold the rank. She served until 2025.

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Photograph by Chris Sean Smith, U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, resized, in the public domain — source.

Janetta Johnson born c. 1964 (age 61–62)

Janetta Johnson, a transgender woman from Tampa, moved to San Francisco in 1997 to learn from Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, whom she calls “my transgender mother who taught me everything I know about being a political organizer.” A drug conviction later sent her to a men’s federal prison on a six-year sentence, of which she served three and a half. She was denied transgender health care there and abused. From inside she worked as a referral liaison for the TGI Justice Project, which Miss Major led, for transgender, intersex and gender-variant people in California’s prisons.

She was released in 2012, succeeded Miss Major as executive director, and now leads it as chief executive. It co-sponsored the Name and Dignity Act, which Johnson worked to pass and which became law in 2017: transgender people in California’s prisons can now petition a court to change their legal name and gender marker. She set up a re-entry programme that pays people leaving prison to work. “I decided, I’m going to create a program so that Black trans women don’t fall through the cracks,” she has said. A prison abolitionist, she also founded, with Honey Mahogany and Aria Sa’id, the Transgender District, and in 2015 she co-founded TAJA’s Coalition after the murder of Taja de Jesus in San Francisco.

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Photograph by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Lana Wachowski born 1965 (age 61)

Wachowski and her sister Lilly made Bound (1996) and The Matrix (1999), which won four Academy Awards and popularised bullet time. She appeared in public for the first time since transitioning in a July 2012 video introducing Cloud Atlas, which made her the first major Hollywood director to come out as transgender. With Lilly and J. Michael Straczynski she created Sense8, shot in nine cities in eight countries, with a transgender actor, Jamie Clayton, as its transgender woman, Nomi; it won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series. She led the second season after Lilly stepped back, and a scene of the young Nomi bullied in a gym shower came from her own life. She directed The Matrix Resurrections (2021) alone.

When the Human Rights Campaign gave her its Visibility Award in October 2012, she said why she had come: “I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world.” With no examples, she had come to believe “that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable”. In high school she had considered suicide.

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Photograph by Harald Krichel, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Julia Serano born 1967 (age 58–59)

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007) argued that transgender women are targeted for crossing a gender line, and especially for the direction they cross it in: towards femininity, which the culture holds in contempt whoever expresses it. That contempt, Serano wrote, is a root that sexism and transphobia share. She named the place they meet trans-misogyny, a prejudice “steeped in the assumption that femaleness and femininity are inferior to, and exist primarily for the benefit of, maleness and masculinity.” Now usually written transmisogyny, it is a central concept of trans feminism, and the book also put cissexism and subconscious sex into circulation. It is assigned on gender studies courses, and NPR called it “a foundational text for anyone hoping to understand transgender politics.”

She wrote it while working as a scientist, with a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from Columbia, and spent seventeen years as a researcher in genetics, evolution and developmental biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She describes herself as a transgender and bisexual activist, and has been a slam poetry champion and the singer and guitarist of the indie-rock band Bitesize. Excluded (2013) turned the argument on feminist and queer movements themselves, and her first novel, 99 Erics (2020), won the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for debut fiction.

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Photograph by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Jin Xing born 1967 (age 59)

Jin joined the People’s Liberation Army at nine as a child dancer and rose to the rank of colonel. She trained in New York under Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, then returned to China, where in 1995 she became one of the first people in the country to transition openly. A medical error during her transition left one leg temporarily paralysed; she recovered and went back to dancing.

She founded Jin Xing Dance Theatre, China’s first independent modern dance company, in 1999, and from 2015 hosted The Jin Xing Show, a talk show with an audience in the tens of millions, and is widely described as the most visible transgender woman in China. Since 2021 her programmes have been pulled and her credits erased. Her social media has been muted, and her company’s tours have been cancelled in one city after another.

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Marlene Wayar born 1968 (age 57)

A social psychologist, Wayar is one of the people who turned travesti into a body of theory. The word was an insult in Spanish and Portuguese before activists in Argentina, Brazil and Peru took it back as a political identity. She co-founded the Silvia Rivera Trans Network of Latin America and the Caribbean and founded Futuro Trans. She directed El Teje, the first travesti newspaper in Latin America, named for the slang word for what cannot be said in front of outsiders, and was part of the coalition that won Argentina’s 2012 Gender Identity Law. Her books, Travesti: una teoría lo suficientemente buena (2018) and the dictionary Furia travesti (2021), claim “the right we have to create that language”.

Asked what being travesti means, she answered “a permanent struggle not to be the poorest option.” She has campaigned for historical reparations while saying plainly that much cannot be repaired, since “we are already 40, 50, 60, we are burnt out, worn down”, and that what her community wants “is not charity, it is access to justice, it is recognition.” “My self-perception is travesti, not woman — clearly not woman,” she said in 2022, when the National University of Rosario made her an honorary doctor, an honour that in her words “does not end in me”.

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Photograph by Vlasta x, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Susy Shock born 1968 (age 57)

Shock, a poet, singer and actor, calls herself a travesti and, more bluntly, a trava. The first word was once used against people like her, until Argentine activists took it back as a political identity. Her best-known poem declares “I claim my right to be a monster … neither man nor woman” and lets “others be the normal ones”. Buenos Aires’s legislature declared her Poemario Trans Pirado of interest for the promotion and defence of human rights in 2014. She came up through the street politics of the 2001 crisis and the Noches Bizarras cabaret, and was part of the coalition that won Argentina’s 2012 Gender Identity Law.

“I am an artist who took more than twenty years to bring out the first book and the first record,” she has said; “above all I am an artist of the stage.” The record, Buena vida y poca vergüenza, came in 2014. She was already raising a daughter at twenty-two. Some of her later work is for and about children: Crianzas, small radio fictions on childhood and diversity that became a book, and a volume in the Antiprincesas series. She hoped it would bring “new Lohanas, Dianas, Marlenes” and, above all, “a lot of questions in their homes” when children read it.

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Photograph by Dan Cortés, resized, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 — source.

Paul B. Preciado born 1970 (age 56)

Preciado’s philosophy treats the body as a site of politics. Testo Junkie (2008) is what he calls a body-essay, written while he dosed himself with testosterone gel. It argues that we live in a “pharmacopornographic” era, in which drug companies and pornography between them manufacture what bodies are taken to be. He went on to curate the public programmes of documenta 14, the Parliament of Bodies, in Athens and Kassel. His 2023 film Orlando, My Political Biography, in which twenty-six trans* people aged eight to seventy take turns playing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, won the Teddy Award and a jury prize at Berlin.

He began his transition slowly in 2010, and has made it part of his work. “I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system.” Addressing 3,500 psychoanalysts in Paris in November 2019 as one of the “monsters” their profession diagnosed, he told them their discipline was complicit in a binary, colonial idea of sex. He was heckled and booed, and could not finish. The speech was published as Can the Monster Speak?

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Photograph by Elena Ternovaja, resized, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 — source.

Laverne Cox born 1972 (age 54)

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Peppermint born 1980 (age 46)

Runner-up on the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2017, Peppermint was the first contestant to arrive already out as a transgender woman. She played Pythio, the nonbinary oracle in the Go-Go’s musical Head Over Heels, in 2018, and became the first openly transgender woman to originate a principal role on Broadway. “When I leave the stage door every night,” she said, “there’s people who are like, ‘I’m non-binary. I saw myself on stage.’” After the murder of George Floyd, NYC Pride and GLAAD handed their headline Pride event in June 2020 to her and Bob the Drag Queen. Their Black Queer Town Hall ran for three days, paid every Black queer person who spoke or performed, and raised money for the Okra Project, which feeds Black trans* people.

Discouraged by musical theatre auditions, where she “could feel the judgment even before I would start singing”, she made her name in New York drag, at Tunnel, Limelight and Barracuda. When RuPaul questioned in 2018 whether transgender women who had transitioned should compete, she answered in Billboard that “absolutely no one has the ability or the right to define your womanhood, manhood or transness, but you.” She says “most of what I do now is advocacy and all of it is unpaid”, and is the ACLU’s first Artist Ambassador for Trans Justice.

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Photograph by Philip Romano, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Audrey Tang born 1981 (age 45)

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Courtney Act born 1982 (age 44)

Shane Jenek auditioned for the first series of Australian Idol in 2003 and was turned away; he came back the next day as Courtney Act and got through. She was joint runner-up on RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2014, and in 2018 won Celebrity Big Brother in Britain, beating former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe in the final. Shane spent the series explaining gender and sexuality to the house and challenging her voting record on gay rights. When another housemate defended her, he answered, “you have these rights not due to people like Ann, but because of the people who stood up against Ann.” Later that year came The Bi Life on E!, the UK’s first dating show for bisexual people.

During Australia’s 2017 vote on marriage equality, she answered the ‘No’ campaign’s claims about schools: “Why not have them educated and informed”. Of being a man or a woman, Shane has said “neither of them felt right.” “For years, I was trying to work out what was wrong with me. And I now realise there was nothing wrong with me, it was actually the system of description that was broken.” Courtney uses he out of drag and she in drag, and has called himself genderqueer and genderfluid.

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Photograph by Manfred Werner, resized, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 — source.

Living Smile Vidya born 1982 (age 44)

Vidya wrote I Am Vidya in Tamil at twenty-five, an account, as one review put it, of her “metamorphosis from a confused young boy to a proud transwoman.” It was translated into seven languages and won one of its translators a Sahitya Akademi award. Its Kannada film adaptation, Naanu Avanalla…Avalu, won two National Film Awards in 2015, including Best Actor. She was the first transgender woman in Tamil Nadu to have her name and gender changed on her passport. She studied theatre in London and founded Panmai, a trans theatre company.

She was born into an Arunthathiyar family, a Dalit caste that was, in her words, “the lowest of the Dalits because occupationally we did manual scavenging”; her mother cleaned streets. She took a master’s degree in linguistics. “I decided that I do not want to be modest and soft spoken to please others or to fit the ideal of a ‘good woman’.” After she spoke against caste and mocked cow worship, threatening calls came, up to four a day. She was working in theatre in Switzerland in 2018 when she applied for asylum. The Swiss refused, reasoning that she was educated, spoke English, and came from a country with a “4000-year-old hijra culture.” “I don’t feel safe in India anymore,” she said. “But I am not ready to die here like this.”

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Photograph by Gee Imaan Semmalar, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Honey Mahogany born 1983 (age 42)

Honey Mahogany, Aria Sa’id and Janetta Johnson founded Compton’s Transgender Cultural District in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in 2017, the first legally recognised transgender district anywhere in the world. It is named after the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, and Mahogany was its founding director. She was appointed to the city’s Democratic County Central Committee in 2018 and won election to it in 2020; no Black trans person had been elected to any post in California before. She became chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party in 2021, when no Black or transgender person had held the role before, and the mayor made her director of the city’s Office of Transgender Initiatives in 2024.

She grew up in San Francisco, the child of East African refugees, and trained as a social worker at Berkeley. A national audience first met her on the fifth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013. “Drag for me had always been a celebration of what was feminine in myself,” she has said. “But I realized that I didn’t have to be in drag to celebrate that about myself and acknowledge the full spectrum of my gender.” When The Stud, one of the city’s queer bars, was put up for sale after a rent rise, she was one of eighteen regulars who bought it as a collective, making it one of the world’s earliest worker-owned nightclubs.

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Photograph by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Carmen Carrera born 1985 (age 41)

Carrera competed on the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2011. “Literally the day after we finished filming the show,” she wrote, “I decided it was time to transition.” She came out in May 2012 on ABC’s What Would You Do?, where, as a waitress abused by a customer, she said, “I’m not a freak, I’m transgender.” Weeks later TLC’s Cake Boss made her the punchline of a prank. She refused an apology and a cake, saying “Transgender people are dying because of stupidity like this”, and TLC pulled the episode. She challenged RuPaul’s defence of transphobic slurs in 2014. Logo apologised for a “Female or She-Male” challenge and pulled it, and fellow alumni accused her of biting the hand that fed her. “I’ve watched my friends in the news that got murdered and never investigated,” she wrote.

A self-described “Jersey girl”, she was raised by her Peruvian mother, her sister and her grandmother; her father died of AIDS when she was two. A widely publicised petition in 2013 urged Victoria’s Secret to make her its first transgender Angel. The next year David LaChapelle photographed her naked for the poster of Vienna’s Life Ball, an AIDS charity event, under the line “I’m Adam, I’m Eve, I’m Me”. “My message is: beauty has no gender,” she said. The poster came in two versions, with different genitalia.

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Photograph by Greg Hernandez, resized, used under CC BY 2.0 — source.

Bob the Drag Queen born 1986 (age 40)

Bob the Drag Queen was arrested in 2010 after walking into traffic on 42nd Street in full drag, holding a sign that read “New York Demands Marriage Equality Now”. The polaroid of it is the cover of her EP Gay Barz. Six years later she won the eighth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. With Peppermint she co-hosted and produced the Black Queer Town Hall in June 2020, three days of performances and discussion streamed by GLAAD with NYC Pride, and the fundraiser she organised for it raised $156,858 to pay Black queer performers and organisations run by and for Black LGBTQ people. That year she also began co-hosting HBO’s We’re Here, which won a Peabody “for shedding light on the radical possibilities of drag as a form of artistic protest”.

Bob is nonbinary and goes by she and he alike. Her novel Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, in which Tubman returns to make a hip-hop album about her own life, was a New York Times bestseller and won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. When she made her Broadway debut as Harold Zidler in Moulin Rouge! in January 2026, she said, “I moved to NYC almost 17 years ago to pursue it,” and added, “Some roads take a while.” She also has a stand-up special, Woke Man in a Dress, and a GLAAD-winning podcast with Monét X Change, and has had a production company, Purse First Studios, since 2025.

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Sasha Velour born 1987 (age 38–39)

Sasha Velour won the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2017 with a lip sync to Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” in which rose petals spilled from her gloves and then, when she pulled off her wig, from her bare head. She performs bald in tribute to her mother, who lost her hair to cancer treatment and died in 2015. “The loss of my mom,” she said that week, “really inspired me to go to a place with my performances that were emotionally honest.”

She came to drag through comics. Her master’s thesis in cartooning was a history of the Stonewall riots, later published as Three Dollar Riot, and she has said she “first created Sasha Velour as a comic character, and slowly became that illustration in real life, too.” Genderfluid, she wants people to know “that nonbinary and trans people are normal, that we can have beautiful lives in the world, and that it’s good to be truthful about who you are.” In Brooklyn she co-founded Velour, a magazine about drag, in 2014 and started the monthly show NightGowns in 2015. Her solo show Smoke & Mirrors toured from 2019 to 2022. She published The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag in 2023, the year she drew a self-portrait for the cover of The New Yorker.

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Jinkx Monsoon born 1987 (age 39)

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Shon Faye born 1988 (age 38)

Faye wrote The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (2021) in response to a British press she saw as having turned trans* people into a debate. It leaves aside the question of whether trans* people should exist and is about the conditions of their lives: housing, work, healthcare, prisons, policing and sex work. Its argument is that trans liberation is bound up with every other fight for a fairer society, and that improving conditions for a minority improves them for everyone. It went straight into the Sunday Times bestseller list, and the campaigner Christine Burns called it “a seminal text, the kind you see only once in a generation.”

She trained as a lawyer and worked in London in her early twenties, until she “had a complete implosion”, quit, moved back to Bristol and came out as a transgender woman. She went on to work for Amnesty International and Stonewall, and to write for the Guardian and the Independent. Her podcast Call Me Mother interviews LGBTQ+ elders. Her second book, Love in Exile (2025), takes the same political approach to romantic love and to her own years of addiction.

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Photograph by Shon Faye, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Natalie Wynn born 1988 (age 37)

Wynn left a philosophy PhD at Northwestern to make YouTube videos. Her ContraPoints video essays deal with politics, gender, sexuality, psychology, ethics and philosophy, through subjects as different as envy, shame, beauty, justice, cringe, incels, cancel culture and conspiracy thinking. Each is heavily researched: for the Twilight video, about the gendered and Christian politics of the series, she read more than a hundred books. She now makes about one video a year, two to three hours long. The videos have been watched more than a hundred million times. She publishes their transcripts, and media and writing scholars study them in peer-reviewed journals. With more than 23,000 paying members as of October 2026, she is among Patreon’s forty most-supported creators. The channel won a Peabody in 2022, for “complex, thoughtful, humorous, and artfully filmed videos that engage deliberative debate”.

She started the channel in 2016 to answer the right-wing YouTubers, engaging with their arguments and with the young men they were drawing in. Some of those viewers changed their minds; Caleb Cain, who had been one of them, credited her empathy for his turn. She transitioned publicly from 2017, in front of the people she was arguing with.

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Photograph by Natalie Wynn, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Aria Sa'id born c. 1989 (age 36–37)

Aria Sa’id, Honey Mahogany and Janetta Johnson founded the Transgender District in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, created by city ordinance in 2017 as the first legally recognised transgender district in the world. Sa’id followed Mahogany as its director. The district dropped Compton’s Cafeteria from its name in 2020; Sa’id explained that they did not want to go on honouring an owner who had had drag queens and trans* people arrested. She pushed for the Guaranteed Income for Trans People programme, which the city launched with the district in 2022: $1,200 a month for up to 18 months to 55 low-income trans* residents. The Rosenberg Foundation called it the first guaranteed income programme in the country designed for trans* people. She called it “a truly community-centered intervention to combat poverty.”

She was born in Portland, Oregon. She founded the Kween Culture Initiative, a social and cultural empowerment project for Black transgender women, and has worked as a programme manager at St. James Infirmary and a policy adviser to the city’s Human Rights Commission. By her own account she was a lead advocate for Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers, a San Francisco policy that lets people report violent crimes they suffer or witness while doing sex work without being arrested for it. She stepped down from the district in April 2023 and moved to Houston, where she runs a consulting firm.

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Photograph by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Jervi Wrightson born 1992 (age 34)

Jervi Wrightson, then known as KaladKaren, began presenting entertainment news on TV5’s Frontline Pilipinas on 12 June 2023; no openly trans person had anchored the news in the Philippines before. Two months earlier she had become the first transgender woman to win best supporting actress at the Metro Manila Film Festival, for Here Comes the Groom. She dedicated it to transgender people, drag artists and LGBTQ+ people “whose lives and existence are being threatened in the world right now”, adding, “we are more than enough.” She and Jiggly Caliente had already, in 2022, become the first transgender women on the permanent panel of any Drag Race.

A broadcast communication graduate of the University of the Philippines, she wrote and produced television, sure that “I can work behind the camera, but I cannot be a news anchor in front of the camera.” A video of her impersonating the broadcaster Karen Davila went viral in 2017, and KaladKaren was born. When she and friends were turned away from a Makati bar in 2018 because of their sexual orientation, Senator Risa Hontiveros called it “a wake-up call for the Senate to pass with urgency the SOGIE Equality Bill”. Married in 2024, she went on air under her new name, and said, “As a trans woman in the Philippines, I have never imagined that one day I’ll be able to use my married name on national TV, prime time newscast.”

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Photograph by Rated Korina, resized, used under CC BY 3.0 — source.

Bimini born 1993 (age 33)

Bimini came second in the second series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2021, and after the final the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote, “you will always be our winner.” The moment people remember came in the third episode, when, sitting with Ginny Lemon, Bimini explained being nonbinary in a few plain sentences on the BBC. Viewers said it gave them the confidence to talk about their own gender with those closest to them, and Bimini had “tons of messages from people from all age groups telling me that because it’s such a simple explanation, ‘Oh, I get it.’”

They grew up in Great Yarmouth knowing, as they put it, “that I was neither here nor there – like I was in between”. Bimini uses she in drag and they out of drag. Since the show have come a bestselling book, a debut EP and Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which they called “the best thing I’ve ever done”. They have been open about addiction, which began in their early twenties and returned after the show, and have said “this is something that is ongoing.” When a Norwich mural of them with a trans rights message was painted over within days, they answered, “Trans rights are human rights, and I will push that message until the end.” At the O2 they told the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, “How dare you use the lives of people as a political football.” They have made the same case at London Trans+ Pride, at the Brit Awards, and at Goldsmiths with a call for justice for Brianna Ghey.

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Photograph by Otto Colwill, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy 1946–2025 (died age 78)

Miss Major was at Stonewall, and spent more than fifty years afterwards getting Black transgender women off the street and into housing. She sat with people dying of AIDS in New York in the early 1980s when hospitals would not, and drove San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange.

She had survived Attica, and much of her later work was about prisons. As executive director of the Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project she built the only organisation in the United States dedicated to trans* people inside prisons, visiting and writing to them, meeting people at the gate and finding them somewhere to go. She called the people she looked after her children. In her seventies she was still working, running the House of gg in Arkansas to train the next generation of organisers.

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Photograph by Quinn Dombrowski, resized, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 — source.

Jiggly Caliente 1980–2025 (died age 44)

Jiggly Caliente competed on the fourth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2012, early in her transition, and kept it private because, she said, “I personally just didn’t think I was ready to face the world and their opinions on my transness.” She came out publicly in 2016. She returned to her birth country in 2022 as a permanent judge on Drag Race Philippines for its first three seasons, and she and KaladKaren became the first two transgender women on the permanent panel of any Drag Race. “I see myself in all the girls,” she said, “not because I’m Filipino but because I was in their shoes.” She also created Translation, an OUTtv talk show on trans lives, with three other transgender women from Drag Race, Peppermint, Kylie Sonique Love and Carmen Carrera.

She was ten when her family moved from the Philippines to Queens. She studied illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology and found drag in New York’s clubs, and said, “Drag was the awakening for my transness.” She did sex work to get by, and was “never ashamed of what I had to go through to survive.” She acted in Broad City and Pose, and died in April 2025, at 44, after a severe infection. Two months later she joined the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn, in an all-trans* class of honourees, beside Lynn Conway and Alan L. Hart.

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Photograph by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Lynn Conway 1938–2024 (died age 86)

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Photograph by Charles Rogers, resized, used under CC BY-SA 2.5 — source.

Georgina Beyer 1957–2023 (died age 65)

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Photograph by New Zealand Government, Office of the Governor-General, resized, used under CC BY 4.0 — source.

SOPHIE 1986–2021 (died age 34)

SOPHIE synthesised every element of a track from scratch, without samples, until it sounded like it was made of latex, sugar and sheet metal. The production style she invented had a wide influence on pop over the following decade, through her work with Charli XCX, Vince Staples, Madonna and a long list of others, and through a debut album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, that was nominated for a Grammy.

She had worked anonymously for years, voice disguised and face hidden, until she released It’s Okay to Cry in 2017, which showed her singing on camera. She died in 2021, at thirty-four, after a fall in Athens.

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Photograph by Questskyzeidler, resized, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — source.

Aimee Stephens 1960–2020 (died age 59)

Stephens was a funeral director in Michigan. She gave her employer a letter in 2013 saying she was a woman and would be coming to work as one, and was fired two weeks later.

She took it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the case went on through district court and the Sixth Circuit to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2019. The decision, which extended employment protection to millions of people, came on 15 June 2020, five weeks after Stephens died of kidney failure. The court held, 6–3, that firing someone for being transgender is discrimination because of sex, and therefore already illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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Photograph by Elvert Barnes, resized, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 — source.

João W. Nery 1950–2018 (died age 68)

Nery had surgery in secret in a São Paulo clinic in 1977, under Brazil’s military dictatorship, when it was illegal, and was the first transgender man in Brazil to do so. He published a memoir, Erro de pessoa: Joana ou João?, in 1984. The deputies Jean Wyllys and Erika Kokay put his name on a gender identity bill in 2013, the Lei João W. Nery, to let trans* people change name and sex on official records without surgery, medical reports or a court order. Congress never passed it, and it was archived in 2019, but the Supreme Court had ruled in 2018 that trans* people could make both changes at a registry office, on their own declaration.

His new documents carried none of his qualifications, so the psychologist, university lecturer and master’s student closed his practice and, as he put it, became illiterate. For three decades he worked as a bricklayer, garment cutter, salesman and taxi driver, hiding to avoid arrest. A second memoir, Viagem solitária, came thirty years after the surgery; Glória Perez read it and talked to him before writing the transgender man in Globo’s 2017 telenovela A Força do Querer. He died of lung cancer in 2018, at 68, and Brazil’s Federal Council of Psychology now gives an award in his name.

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Photograph by Circuito Fora do Eixo, resized, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 — source.

Ben Barres 1954–2017 (died age 63)

The brain has roughly as many glial cells as neurons, and for a century they were treated as packing material, the stuff holding the interesting cells apart. Barres spent his career proving that glia actively build, prune and maintain the connections between neurons, and that when they go wrong they are implicated in neurodegenerative disease. He became the first openly trans member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

Having worked as a scientist before and after transitioning, he could compare how he was treated, and said so publicly. After a seminar he gave at the Whitehead Institute, one scientist remarked to another that his work was “much better than his sister’s”; the earlier work was his own, from before he transitioned. In his last decade he argued publicly for women and minorities in science, writing that bias is why so few of them reach the top of research, and naming the people who put it down to aptitude.

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Photograph by Myelin Repair Foundation, resized, used under CC BY 2.0 — source.

Lohana Berkins 1965–2016 (died age 50)

Berkins founded the Asociación de Lucha por la Identidad Travesti y Transexual (ALITT) in 1994 and led it until she died. She joined the Communist Party in 1998 and went to work as an adviser to the legislator Patricio Echegaray. The Nadia Echazú textile cooperative, whose creation she led in 2008, was a cooperative and school that gave travestis and trans* people work other than sex work. She formed the National Front for the Gender Identity Law in 2010, and Congress passed the law on 9 May 2012. From 2013 she headed the Office of Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation at the Gender Observatory in the justice system of the City of Buenos Aires. The national law of 2021 that requires at least 1% of public-sector staff to be travesti and trans* people is named after her and Diana Sacayán.

She was born in Pocitos, in Salta, and her father threw her out of home at thirteen. “Unlike gays and lesbians, we travestis have no choice about our visibility,” she wrote in her essay “Un itinerario político del travestismo”. “We cannot choose not to tell our families what we are or want to be.” In a 2000 interview she said: “My life was very hard, but despite all this, if I could be born again and choose, I would choose to be travesti.” She died of hepatitis C in Buenos Aires in 2016.

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Photograph by Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, resized, used under CC BY 2.0 — source.

Sylvia Rivera 1951–2002 (died age 50)

Homeless at eleven and working the street soon after, Rivera was at Stonewall and co-founded STAR with Marsha P. Johnson. For the next thirty years she argued, against much of the movement, that a respectable campaign which left the street queens behind was not worth winning.

At the 1973 Christopher Street rally she had to fight her way onto the stage past organisers who did not want her on it, and was booed by a crowd of the people she had rioted alongside. She spoke anyway, about the transgender women in jail whose letters she was answering and about who exactly had been doing the work. The speech is still quoted. She lived rough for much of the 1990s, revived STAR, and helped run Transy House in Brooklyn on the model of the shelter she and Johnson had built. She was negotiating with the Human Rights Campaign over trans inclusion from her deathbed in 2002.

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Detail from a drawing by Gary LeGault, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — see the whole drawing.

Marsha P. Johnson 1945–1992 (died age 46)

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Detail from a drawing by Gary LeGault, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 — see the whole drawing.

Claude Cahun 1894–1954 (died age 60)

For thirty years Cahun made photographs of themself, shaved-headed, masked, in costume. “Masculine? Feminine?” they wrote in the 1930s. “It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” The work then sat almost entirely unknown for some sixty years, until the late 1980s.

Cahun moved to Jersey in 1937 with Marcel Moore, their partner and collaborator of four decades. When the Germans occupied the island, the two of them ran a resistance campaign out of their house. They cut up Nazi propaganda and wrote notes in German designed to sound like they came from a disillusioned soldier, signed der Soldat ohne Namen, the soldier with no name, then slipped them into pockets, cigarette packets and parked cars to spread doubt through the garrison. They kept it up for four years. Both were arrested in 1944 and sentenced to death, and were still in prison when the island was liberated.

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Self-portrait by Claude Cahun, now in the public domain — source.