A Home Where We Thrive

By Honey Mahogany

Imagine a place where trans people thrive. Imagine a place where we have a home and a community, where we can afford housing, start a business, start a family, and have access to amenities that serve us. Imagine a place where we are surrounded by affirmation—from the people in the street, the art on the buildings, the plaques on the sidewalks, the flags on the light poles. Imagine a place where we can thrive.

When Janetta Johnson, Aria Sai’d, Stephany Ashley, Nate Allbee, Brian Basinger, and I came together to establish the Transgender District, that is what we imagined. A sanctuary for trans people; a safe space in a city known for being a gay mecca, but where we saw trans people and our city’s trans history falling through the cracks. We built on the work of Dr. Susan Stryker—who rediscovered the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riots, widely proclaimed as the first officially documented LGBTQ uprising in the country— and founded the district centering the location where this pivotal event in our city’s history took place. At the time, San Francisco, like many other cities across the country, was experiencing a crisis. We were losing many of our LGBTQ serving businesses and spaces, and many members of our community were being completely pushed out of the city. Even the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that has been a sanctuary for trans and gender non-conforming people for decades, was becoming unaffordable. Many of our trans community members, especially our seniors, were barely surviving on social security checks and struggled to pay rent for their SRO apartments even with rental subsidies. While the impetus to create the district was to stem the tide of displacement, we knew that, in order to truly serve our community and make a lasting impact, our vision had to be far broader. We envisioned a place where trans people could thrive.

Over the last six years the Trans District has done much to make that vision a reality. Place making efforts include murals within the district, art panels on Big Belly trash cans, and a public awareness campaign titled “Know Our Place.” A visual storytelling project chronicled the experiences of trans people living in San Francisco. An Entrepreneurship Accelerator for Trans and Queer people included a four-month bootcamp program and a seed grant for program graduates. In its early days, the Transgender District also had a rental subsidy program, and during COVID-19, the district was one of the first organizations to provide direct financial assistance to those in need. Sadly, while we have been busy trying to make San Francisco a more welcoming and celebratory place for

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