Extraordinary transgender and nonbinary Americans who improved the lives of their fellow Americans
The national impact of 4 transgender individuals, past and present
Sharing the stories of a few of the many trans and nonbinary Americans whose perseverance, courage and community spirit made the U.S. a better place for both its cisgender inhabitants and transgender inhabitants.
Of course, trans people shouldn't need to be a model minority or heroically sacrifice themselves in order to be deemed worthy of basic human respect by cis-dominant society. But we are at a point where “mainstream” coverage of trans issues has given too many cisgender people the skewed impression that the only relevance transgender people have in their lives is to inconvenience them with our pronouns, or to serve as targets of controversy in sports or restrooms.
Trans people are often falsely implied to be financial burdens to society (see House passes defense spending bill with anti-trans provision, Advocate, December 11, 2024) when the population of people who need gender-affirming healthcare is too small to have a significant impact on insurance rates.
According to a 2015 study by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, Paying for Transgender Health Care Cost-Effective:
…the cost to cover transgender people would be fewer than two pennies per month for every person with health insurance coverage in the United States…For this small investment for a small number of people, we could improve their lives significantly and make them more productive members of society.
Trans and nonbinary people are also framed as social inconveniences who put other people through the trouble of having to rethink the common behavior of “I’ll assign you a pronoun of my choice based on the binary box I put you in according to my subjective visual/aural assessment of your characteristics”.
Some individuals feel so entitled to calling community members unwanted names or pronouns that they have to make laws to protect their “right” to be disrespect someone else’s personhood. See Anti-Trans Pronoun Law: House Bill 538 (2024) Fact Sheet released by ACLU of Idaho. And Idaho isn’t the only state with laws against respecting an individual’s pronouns.
Given that popular discourse frames transgender individuals as burdens, inconveniences, or worse - and almost never presents stories of transgender people lifting society’s burdens or introducing life-changing innovations - we don't have the luxury of hoping that the average person brainwashed by negative media coverage can quickly make an awareness leap to the point where they see everyone, including TGNC people, as having an equal right to be ordinary and imperfect. In sharing the stories of TGNC individuals who made America a better place on the national level, "respectability politics" isn't the end goal, but rather a steppingstone for some people on the way to a more equitable way of looking at things, hopefully.
For a global list of trans and binary heroes making positive impacts on the larger community, see Transgender and nonbinary heroes serving our larger society.