But the 21st century witnessed a dramatic shift. As society began to understand gender as a spectrum rather than a binary, the transgender community moved to the center of LGBTQ activism. The legal victories for gay marriage (e.g., Obergefell v. Hodges in the U.S. in 2015) shifted the movement’s focus. Once marriage equality was achieved, the most urgent battles left were overwhelmingly about transgender rights: access to gender-affirming healthcare, the right to use bathrooms aligning with one’s gender, protection from employment discrimination, and the right to update identification documents.

LGBTQ culture, therefore, owes its rebellious, anti-assimilationist spirit directly to transgender pioneers. While some gay men and lesbians in the 1970s and 80s sought respectability by distancing themselves from "gender deviants," it was the trans community that reminded everyone that the fight was never about fitting into heteronormative boxes—it was about smashing those boxes entirely.

Television and film have also acted as cultural unifiers. Shows like Pose (which centered on trans women of color in the 1980s ballroom scene) and Disclosure (a documentary on trans representation in Hollywood) educated both cis-gay and cis-straight audiences about the unique dignity and struggle of trans lives. Ballroom culture—with its categories of "realness," voguing, and houses—is a quintessential LGBTQ art form that was created almost entirely by Black and Latina trans women.