Every day, people walk through the doors of the Transgender District carrying the weight of a world that has decided, at the highest levels of the U.S. government, that they should not exist. They come looking for work, housing, and a community to embrace them. Many have just arrived in San Francisco, seeking refuge from the legal restrictions and violence they are experiencing in other states.
As the only Transgender District in the world, rooted in a city seen as a sanctuary for trans and nonbinary people everywhere, I think often about what San Francisco has promised us. This year, both America and San Francisco mark their 250th anniversary, while trans and nonbinary people watch their rights rolled back in real time. Such a moment begs the question: what, exactly, are we celebrating?
Trans people have been systemically written out of American history for centuries. Dr. Megan Rohrer, a trans community leader and historian, documents how in 1917, a trans woman named Geraldine Portico was arrested for “female impersonation” at the corner of Market and Sixth Street, on the same ground where the Transgender District stands today. After the arrest, she was deported to Mexico. More than a century later, a trans drag artist named Hilary Rivers was arrested by ICE, and a trans woman and activist, Jupiter Peraza, recently had her DACA application delayed. Our community has known about these patterns for a long time, even when we were told there was nothing to be afraid of.
What We Stand to Lose
Communities from the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco also know what it means to build vital programs, only to witness them disappear. The National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first trans-led behavioral health peer support program in the country, was founded here in the Tenderloin in 1968 in the wake of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. It served our community for years, and then, due to lack of funding, it closed.
What is unfolding now across the country carries the full weight of American tradition behind it, with more institutional power than at any previous moment in modern history. The religious and political right has spent decades building toward this control. Trans people were never collateral damage in some broader culture war; we have always been the intended target.
Our community has long understood what the federal government has now made explicit: that trans people were never meant to be included in the promise of freedom this country is celebrating. For example, the White House’s 2026 counterterrorism strategy formally designated “radically pro-transgender” groups as priority threats, directing agencies to rapidly “identify and neutralize” our communities. Additionally, The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued multiple “Red Flag Alerts” warning the United States is in the early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans people, citing a 668 percent increase in anti-trans legislation since 2021.
But San Francisco has long been a stronghold for queer resistance.
The 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot happened right here in the Tenderloin, years before Stonewall, when trans women and drag queens fought back against police who had been brutalizing them for years. That history belongs to San Francisco. As I watch waves of new billionaire wealth pour into this city under this new administration, I see how swiftly that history, and the work we do to keep these neighborhoods alive, can be buried.
For Black and brown trans people, San Francisco’s reputation as a sanctuary has always come with conditions. That was true before this political moment, and it is simply harder to ignore now.
A Precarious and Critical Moment
In this context, the local policy picture tells you what the mayoral speeches will not.
Mayor Lurie’s Charter Reform Initiative, heading to SF voters in November 2026, proposes eliminating voter-protected budget set-asides, threatening the $3 million in annual hotel tax funding that communities fought for and won by a 75 percent majority in 2018 to sustain Cultural Districts like the Transgender District. The same initiative would raise the ballot threshold from 2 to 8 percent of registered voters, making it dramatically harder for grassroots communities to ever win those protections back.
The promised equity commitments of Proposition D have not materialized either, as reductions to neighborhood-based programs, Cultural Districts and community services have quietly shifted resources away from the grassroots organizations doing the most essential work for the city’s most vulnerable residents. The resources our communities built to protect themselves are being dismantled in the most LGBTQ-friendly city in the country.
In the words of Lala, founder of Shot of Culture podcast:
“Mayor Lurie has aligned himself with the Trump administration in their combined attacks on LGBQIA+ and most especially the Transgender community. He shares donors with MAGA tech oligarchs under a facade that San Francisco remains a ‘progressive’ city. The city’s ‘comeback’ is a ploy for the Trump administration to forcibly push AI into every community on earth, drain our resources and devastate foreign countries while uplifting people like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. These (and many other) tech oligarchs have prospered in San Francisco unabated under the Lurie administration and his refusal to tax the rich through Proposition D in San Francisco while lobbying against the upcoming California Billionaire wealth tax in November. As San Franciscans we must stand together against all forms of budget cuts and fascism in our own city.”
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The cuts are already landing. The SF Community Health Center lost federal CDC funding in early 2025, specifically because of its work serving transgender patients. SF Department of Public Health cut more than $17 million from community-based organizations in early 2026, gutting LGBTQ+ health services and harm reduction programs. Tenderloin clinics connected to Larkin Street Youth Services closed. At the Transgender District, we shut down our Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program in 2025 after losing city funding and paused our social justice fellowship and community advisory boards.
In San Francisco, trans-led organizations are being forced into a scarcity model, competing against each other and against broader LGBTQ+ organizations for a shrinking pool of resources. That competition fractures the coalitions we need most right now.
However, we continue to build.
Building Collective Power and Solidarity
Across the Tenderloin, we are doing placemaking and preservation work, making trans contributions to this city visible and physically permanent. A new mural project will feature scenes from our history and showcase the work of emerging trans and nonbinary artists across the walls of the community that sits at the heart of this resistance. We also launched the Riot Fund, a multi-year emergency fund that has raised over $128,000 through grassroots and philanthropic fundraising to keep our work afloat. In the words of Dr. Saidah Leatutufu-Burch:
“Trans and queer communities, specifically Black and brown folx, have always been resilient and resisted in the pursuit of collective liberation. We must recognize that catalysts of revolutionary movements include trans and queer people such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Bayard Rustin. These relatives have consistently made visible and fought for our collective human rights despite being invisibilized. Trans rights and LGBTQ+ rights are human rights and worthy of investment.”
We are also building in solidarity with our sister LGBTQ+ organizations. This Pride season, 11 LGBTQ+ service providers came together to oppose the mayor’s proposed FY 2026–27 budget cuts, which would eliminate nearly a quarter of all trans-specific programs in San Francisco. Those cuts amount to less than 0.02 percent of the city’s total budget. Through recent city advocacy, we’ve recovered some of what was proposed to be cut, though partial victories in a city that should not be cutting at all are not the same as safety.
“We bear the responsibility to exist and to resist in every way possible, including through the sheer joy of our existence, so that any attempt to erase us becomes utterly impossible,” said Nicole Santamaria, the executive director of local trans-led organization El/La Para Translatinas. “It is also essential to forge healthy alliances, build trust and join forces, in order to confront any attack launched against our very existence.”
What we are mounting in San Francisco is a blueprint for what holding the line looks like. Trans communities across this country, in states with fewer protections and far fewer resources, are watching what happens here. What we build matters far beyond the borders of this city.
We Will Always Be Here
I think about the trans and nonbinary folks who walk through the district’s doors, and what it means that they keep coming, even now. They are not coming because things are easy. They are coming because they know someone is still here, and because for so many of them, this place is the proof that they are worth fighting for. And as San Francisco and America celebrate 250 years of history, many transgender and non-binary people recognize that these milestones have not always included us. For much of this nation’s history, our communities have faced exclusion, discrimination, criminalization and erasure.
However, those who attempt to erase us don’t seem to understand that we will always be here. Even now, when the full weight of federal power is being used to dismantle our autonomy, you cannot take our joy. From the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and Stonewall, to the countless transgender and non-binary leaders, artists, activists and everyday people who have fought for dignity and belonging—our history is one of courage and transformation. Trans and nonbinary people have shaped cultures and built lives—all while resisting a society designed to exclude us—for as long as we have existed, and no administration or regime will change that.
I have more freedom than my parents ever had. That is the legacy I carry, and it is what I am building toward for the next Breonna McCree, and everyone else who walks through those doors after me.
To every ally, funder and institution reading this: our community will still be here, because we’ve built a legacy that’s endured the test of time. However, we are sounding the alarm that this moment requires all of us to invest in and protect trans and nonbinary communities. Now is the time to show up, while there are still communities to show up for.
