Mixed!

The question is can the two be separated? Can her later life make up for her earlier comments?

In her early years she was anti-trans, Gloria Steinem publish some heavy works against us, her comments about Renee Richards were very negative.. she was a fan of Janice Raymond, but that changed over time.

Looking Back on Gloria Steinem’s Turn Toward Transgender Rights
The late feminist icon spent her later years using her voice for transgender rights.
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By Mathew Rodriguez , Quispe López

September 3, 2026

 

 

 Trailblazing feminist icon Gloria Steinem died at her New York City home on Wednesday, per a statement on her social media. As many of her obituaries will attest, Steinem publicly challenged gender stereotypes in the earliest days of her journalism and activism careers, dating back to the 1960s.

Though her legacy of feminist activism also included a hefty amount of advocacy on behalf of transgender people, that was not always the case. Steinem’s earliest known writing on trans people, from a February 1977 issue of Ms., the magazine which she co-founded a few years earlier, waded into the debate on transgender athletes — which, yes, was happening half a century ago. The article, “If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot,” concerns Renée Richards, a tennis player who had transitioned in the 1970s. In the article, Steinem wrote that “we ought to be very, very suspicious of the social reasons for transsexuality as well as its big, star-spangled, commercial exploitation.”

Year, Steinem voiced support for some of the core tenets of Janice Raymond’s infamous 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire, which is considered a defining work of trans-exclusionary radical feminism. In a 2012 interview for Vassar College, Steinem referenced the book, saying, “Doctors were really profiting off this surgery and especially hormonal treatments. Hormonal treatments, in general, whether for fertility or for gender purposes, nobody knows whether they’re dangerous or not. And that’s a worry. I just think our choices need to be informed.”

One of the marks of a really great person is that they stop and reassess their core beliefs  

 Gloria Steinem, feminist trailblazer who championed LGBTQ+ equality, dies at 92
The legendary journalist fought Anita Bryant’s antigay crusade, defended lesbians in the pages of The Advocate and later confronted her own complicated history with transgender people. 

The Advocate

Christopher Wiggins 

Sep 03, 2026

Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became one of the most recognizable figures in American feminism and a longtime supporter of LGBTQ+ equality, has died. She was 92.

[...]

Steinem’s support for gay and lesbian people was visible early in the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Time reported in 1977 that gay activists persuaded her to travel to Miami as they fought Anita Bryant’s campaign to repeal Dade County’s ordinance prohibiting discrimination against gay people. Speaking later that year at an American Association of University Women convention, Steinem said lesbians were “the most vulnerable group of women” and argued that the word lesbian had to become “as honorable as any other.”

Steinem was among the prominent supporters of the Human Rights Campaign Fund in its early years.

 But she was back then anti-trans. But in an Advocate article from 2013 she writes,

 Such stories led me to write a 1977 essay reminding us that, in addition to supporting informed choices like those of Jan Morris, Renee Richards, and others in the news at the time, we also needed to change society to fit individuals. It asked the question: If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

Years passed the Internet arrived, and words circulated out of time and context. Last year one young transgender student on campus assumed that old essay's use of the word "mutilate" for surgeries performed because of societal pressure meant I was against sexual reassignment surgery altogether. He didn't consider that it had been written two generations before he was born, and also in the context of global protests against routine surgical assaults, called female genital mutilation by some survivors.

So now I want to be unequivocal in my words: I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make. And what I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of "masculine" or "feminine" and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.

 Lambda Legal wrote...

 “Yesterday we lost a giant. For more than half a century, Gloria Steinem insisted that none of us is free until all of us are free, and she understood long before her peers that the fight for women’s rights and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights are one and the same. She stood with our community when it was neither safe nor popular to do so, naming plainly that feminists and LGBTQ+ people share the same struggle and the same opponents. She helped beat back Anita Bryant’s campaign to strip gay people of protection from discrimination, and insisted the word ‘lesbian’ be spoken with as much honor as any other. 

Yes, a leopard can change their spots.

 

We have lost two true allies... Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem, they both made the world a better place.