In 1970 Sylvia L. Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two participants in the Stonewall uprising the year before, created Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to empower marginalized youth and people of color before the term “transgender” was widely used. 

The first group in the United States to organize explicitly around trans rights and self-determination, STAR emerged from the organizing after Stonewall. Rivera and Johnson sought to create family support structures for other trans youth of color through STAR House on East 2nd Street, the first shelter of its kind in the nation. STAR also called for radical change within the gay liberation movement and society at large.

Protesting discrimination and violence against their bodies, clothing, choice of sexual partners, and other markers of identity and expression, trans activists in STAR, the Queens Liberation Front, and other pioneering New York groups won their first victories in the form of state protections in the early 1970s. They also pushed for inclusion in the gay and women’s liberation movements.

Over the next two decades, trans activists continued to develop their own communities of support. In recent years, an intergenerational group of trans activists renewed a broader push for inclusive language, legal protections, and identity expression, confronting gender binaries and seeking safety, equality, and power. STAR folded in 1973, but its work helped shape trans organizing to this day.