Our Champions

Our history of activism goes way back and for those who are just coming out might not know our pioneers who blazed the way for us.

Once a Pariah, Now a Judge: The Early Transgender Journey of Phyllis Frye
New York Times
By Deborah Sontga
August 29, 2015

HOUSTON — Nearly four decades before Caitlyn Jenner introduced herself to the world, Phyllis Randolph Frye came out as a transgender woman in a far less glamorous way. No Diane Sawyer, no Vanity Fair.

It was the summer of 1976. As Bruce Jenner, 26, was celebrating his decathlon victory at the Montreal Olympics, Phillip Frye, 28, was admitting defeat in suppressing his gender identity. He, becoming she, had already lost a lot: He had been forced to resign from the military for “sexual deviation.” He had been disowned by his parents, divorced by his first wife and separated from his son. He had been dismissed from several engineering jobs.

One of her first activism was repealing the crossdressing laws in Houston in 1980 and she would go on to accomplish,

Having felt the sting of gay groups’ rejection long ago, Ms. Frye led some of the earliest sorties in what became a pitched battle for transgender inclusion. She repeatedly argued that homophobia and transphobia were entwined, and made the case that many transgender people are themselves gay.

At the same time, Ms. Frye was one of the first to act on the need for transgender advocates to develop their own legal theories and agenda. In the 1990s, she convened annual transgender law conferences, where grass-roots activists from around the country first met and developed an aspirational transgender bill of rights. Between events, she helped tether the growing network through group emails she called her “Phyllabusters.”

She would then tackle “Gay Inc.”

Like others, Ms. Frye was frustrated that gay groups had distanced themselves from the transgender cause. Although transgender activists like Sylvia Rivera had played a prominent role at Stonewall, a rift developed afterward. In the early 1970s, mainstream gay groups came to emphasize “a gender normative model of gay identity,” as Mr. Minter, the White House appointee, put it.

“The Gucci-shoes crowd, the gays and lesbians on Wall Street, they saw us as a politically embarrassing subgroup,” Ms. Frye said. “In Houston, the gay and lesbian political caucus thought we were going to slow down their progress. So it became, ‘If they’re going to shut us out, then we’re going to do our own thing.’”

She goes on to fight the HRC and to lobby Congress for gender inclusive legislation long before it became commonplace for trans people to lobby.

I meet her at Fantasia Fair in Provincetown MA in 2003 when she was given the Virginia Prince Transgender Pioneer Award and she gave a keynote address.