LGBTQ+ History Month: when it is, and trans history to know

LGBTQ+ History Month is not one month. The United States keeps it in October, the United Kingdom in February, and other countries have picked their own. What they share is a starting point: history that was left out of classrooms, and people who decided to put it back. Below, where each one comes from, and then ten moments of trans history that belong in any of them.

October in the United States

The US month was proposed in January 1994 by Rodney Wilson, a high school history teacher in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. He wanted LGBT history to have a month of its own, the way women's history and Black history did.

June was out, because school is closed. October had no competing observance, fell in the school year, and happened to be the month of both the first and second LGBT Marches on Washington, in 1979 and 1987, and of National Coming Out Day on 11 October. GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Education Association endorsed it early.

Since 2006 the organisation Equality Forum has run the month's content, featuring 31 LGBT icons, one for each day of October.

February in the United Kingdom

The UK month was created by Sue Sanders and Paul Patrick, co-chairs of the education charity Schools OUT. The idea came after the repeal of Section 28 by the Local Government Act 2003. Lynne Nicholls, who chairs the Schools OUT trustees, describes that law as having amounted in practice to a blanket ban on talking about LGBT+ lives in schools; once it was gone, Sanders and Patrick felt that nothing was being done to tell LGBT+ people's story there.

It was launched at the end of 2004 and first held in February 2005. February was chosen for a practical reason: it is one of the quieter times in the school year, with a half-term. According to Nicholls, trans people were represented on the panel from the very first launch.

Other countries

Many countries now hold a version; one US radio report counts around twenty. A few that are well documented:

• Australia: October, since 2016, when Minus18 and the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives ran the first national campaign.
• Hungary: first held in February 2013, organised by the Háttér Society and the Labrisz Lesbian Association.
• Berlin: Queer History Month, first held in Berlin schools in February 2014, a project of the historian Martin Lücke with the education initiative QUEERFORMAT and the city's education department.
• The Netherlands: March, as Queer Geschiedenismaand, an initiative of IHLIA LGBTI Heritage, the national LGBTQIA+ archive.
• Finland: a Queer History Month coordinated by Seta and the Culture for All service.

Some of these dates have shifted over the years: Hungary's, for example, is now listed under March by an international network of history months. If you want to take part, check with a local LGBTQ+ archive or organisation.

Ten moments of trans history worth knowing

These ten put trans people at the centre, in date order. Where we already have a full article, we link to it rather than repeat it.

• 1919 to 1933: an institute in Berlin. On 6 July 1919 Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, the first of its kind in the world, where some of the earliest medical transitions were supported. On 6 May 1933 Nazi students and SA members ransacked it, and days later its books and files were burned. Who was the first transgender person? tells that part of the story, and Lili Elbe follows one of the institute's patients.
• 1 December 1952: Christine Jorgensen on the front page. The New York Daily News ran her story on its front page under the headline Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty, and she became famous almost overnight. Her story, and what she did with the attention, is in Christine Jorgensen.
• 25 April 1965: Dewey's, Philadelphia. Dewey's management had told staff to refuse service to a group of gender-variant teenagers, and staff applied it to anyone who looked gay or did not fit gender conventions. On 25 April 1965, 150 people were refused service in a sit-in; three teenagers and the activist Clark Polak were arrested, and a second sit-in followed on 2 May. It was among the earliest protests of its kind in the US.
• August 1966: Compton's Cafeteria, San Francisco. Three years before Stonewall, customers at Compton's Cafeteria in the Tenderloin fought back against police harassment, in what the GLBT Historical Society calls a key moment in transgender history. So little was written down at the time that the exact date has never been established. An earlier clash at Cooper Do-nuts in Los Angeles, usually placed in 1959, is often cited too, but it rests on very few accounts, chiefly John Rechy's 1963 novel City of Night.
• 28 June 1969 and after: Stonewall, then STAR. The Stonewall uprising began in New York on 28 June 1969. In 1970 Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founded STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, in New York; some sources date it to 1971.
• 1970 to 2004: April Ashley's case, and what undid it. In 1970 an English court voided April Ashley's marriage in Corbett v Corbett, holding that a person's sex is fixed at birth. That ruling remained the main authority in the UK until the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The turning point came on 11 July 2002, when the European Court of Human Rights found in Christine Goodwin v the United Kingdom that the lack of legal recognition of her gender violated her right to private life. The Gender Recognition Act received Royal Assent on 1 July 2004.
• 1999: a mayor becomes an MP. Georgina Beyer, elected mayor of Carterton in New Zealand in 1995, won the Wairarapa seat in parliament in 1999. Her election as the world's first openly transgender mayor and MP drew attention worldwide.
• 20 November 1999: the first Trans Day of Remembrance. Gwendolyn Ann Smith held a vigil in San Francisco for Rita Hester, murdered the year before. The day is now kept around the world; see Trans Day of Visibility, Day of Remembrance and other dates.
• May 2012: Argentina's Gender Identity Law. Argentina allowed anyone to change the name and gender on their identity documents through a simple administrative procedure. The law says explicitly that no one has to prove surgery, hormone treatment or any psychological or medical treatment to do so, and Human Rights Watch describes Argentina as leading the way in its region on legal gender recognition.
• 25 May 2019: out of the mental disorders chapter. The World Health Organization approved the removal of gender identity disorder from the eleventh International Classification of Diseases, with gender incongruence placed in a new chapter on sexual health. A WHO official explained that the agency now had a "better understanding that it was not actually a mental health condition".

Using the month well

A history month is most useful when it sends you to real people rather than slogans. Pick one name from the list above and read further than the headline. If there is an LGBTQ+ archive near you, visit it or its website and look for the trans history of your own region.