Reclaiming Our History, Transexual Menace Roars Back to Life at Stonewall
A fiery rally outside Stonewall Inn marked the re-emergence of an activist group that had been a force from the days of Brandon Teena. “You never really get away from being a menace,” a founder said, “but I’m angry I have to do it.”
By Valorie Van-Dieman
Photographs and Reporting by Simon Feisthauer Fournet
The Transexual Menace returned to a birthplace of the gay rights movement on Saturday, drawing hundreds of people in frigid temperatures for a fiery protest over the erasure of TQ+ from the official Stonewall Inn website.
“The Transexual Menace is not a cuddly minority you can take home and place on a shelf, next to an elf,” Denise Norris, a founder of the Transexual Menace, an activist organization that traces its roots to the 1990s, told the crowd in a passionate speech leading off the event.
The crowd at Christopher Park
“We have prickly thorns when you deny us our visibility and equality,” Norris said. “Equality is never achieved by becoming acceptable to the oppressor, and acceptability is not our goal. Erasure is never acceptable, and being acceptable is not equality.”
From the days of Brandon Teena through the early 2000s, the Transexual Menace regularly organized protests and other forms of activism. The group saw a significant drop in the need for activism in 2009 after a turning of the tide for gay marriage and a series of expansions for trans rights.
Now, in 2025, the need for activism has re-emerged with a vengeance: A long string of discriminatory actions undertaken by President Trump has sought to oppress, silence, and erase trans people from American society. The actions are being challenged, with some success, in courts across the country. While some private organizations have complied in advance, a number have resisted in part because of public outrage.
Last week, a day before the protest, as I was making a marathon drive north to New England from Mississippi, I was sitting at a rest stop in Tennessee on the phone with Norris, a smart, boisterous woman. We spoke at length about what it was like reviving The Menace after a long period of dormancy, “You never really get away from being a menace,” she joked, “but I’m angry I have to do it, The Menace shouldn’t be needed. I was so happy looking at the newer generation that felt so safe to come out.”
I asked her what she hoped to accomplish Saturday, she said “Visibility! Reclaiming our heritage. Reclaiming our history. They can erase us from federal databases, but they can’t erase us from our hearts!”
The Stonewall Inn, across from Christopher Park, is a birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. In 1969, following one of many regular raids on the gay bar, a series of riots broke out.
The year following the riots saw the formation of the first activist organizations willing to use “gay” in the name. One year later, on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, pride marches were held across the country, the first of their kind in the United States.
Denise Norris
On Saturday, at the rally, Denise spoke of the value of trans liberation, and described the attacks on the rights of trans people as a portent of things to come for the broader LGBTQ+ community. She called on trans people to make themselves known and to be visible, to resist being driven away by those who would want us gone. This was the second LGBTQ+ protest at Christopher Park in as many weeks.
After her speech, an open mic was set up to allow people to make their voices heard, and many people had things to say. Trans folk, advocates, allies, doctors, and even some kids took to the mic to express their opposition to the actions taken by Trump and his administration.
Angelica Christina
“This is the birthplace of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement, it reverberated throughout history and throughout the world,” said Angelica Christina, a trans actress, model and board member of The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, the Stonewall Inn’s own nonprofit. “What came from the days of rebellion would later result in what we know today as Pride. Let me be perfectly clear: Pride would not exist without trans folks.”
Dr. Carla Smith
Dr. Carla Smith, the chief executive of the NYC LGBT community center declared, “Our community’s history is too resilient and our movement for justice is too powerful to ever be silenced by anybody. We will not be divided, we will not be forced to shrink or to conform to the ways anybody thinks we should identify.”
Since the reactivation of The Transexual Menace, and even more following the protest, the Discord where its leaders organize has seen calls for more action and protests across the country. Subgroups have been set up to allow for more granular regional organizing.
The theme of these movements, as it has been all along, is visibility. To let the people in power know that we are here and we cannot be erased.
Valorie Van-Dieman (she/they) is the editorial assistant at Assigned Media. @valorievandieman.bsky.social
Simon Feisthauer Fournet (he/him) is a French freelance journalist based in New York City mainly covering social justice issues.