By Shannon Minter

I am a transgender man born in 1961 and have worked as an attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights since 1993. For the past thirty plus years, I have been privileged to be part of California’s remarkable journey to become the most supportive state for LGBTQ people in the country.

For decades, California’s LGBTQ people faced systematic exclusion. Straight couples received health insurance, pension coverage, and family leave—LGBTQ people got nothing. While no longer criminalized or institutionalized, they remained invisible under the law.

But then California changed everything. The state pioneered workplace benefits, relationship recognition, and transgender rights that transformed LGBTQ families’ lives nationwide.

No state in the nation has seen more progress for transgender people. From the Compton Cafeteria Riots of 1966 to the founding of the Radical Faeries by Harry Hay in 1979 to the creation of the Transgender Law Center in 2002, California has repeatedly broken new ground for transgender equality. In 1994, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission held an “Investigation into Discrimination Against Transgendered People”—one of the first official government hearings on transgender issues in the United States. Among those testifying was Tamara Ching, known as the “Godmother of Polk Street” for her advocacy for homeless transgender youth, people with HIV, and sex-workers. Jamison Green, a prominent transgender rights activist who led FTM International from 1991 to 1999, wrote a report documenting the widespread discrimination transgender people faced.

This 1994 hearing led to San Francisco becoming the first major city to include “gender identity” as a protected class in its nondiscrimination ordinances in 1995, establishing protections that would soon be replicated across the country.

Meanwhile, California was also creating a paradigm shift in protections for LGBT workers. In 1996, San Francisco enacted the first Equal Benefits Ordinance in the country—a law with a simple but powerful premise: if you want to do business with San Francisco, you must provide equal benefits to same-sex partners. The driving force behind this groundbreaking ordinance was Geoff Kors, a prominent gay lawyer and legal adviser to Bevan Dufty, an openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The business community initially resisted. Airlines and major corporations filed lawsuits, arguing that federal law preempted such local requirements. But the city prevailed, and something remarkable happened: most companies chose to change their policies nationwide, rather than maintain separate standards for San Francisco. Within five years, the number of companies offering domestic partner benefits skyrocketed from just 500 to over 4,500.

Simultaneously, California was creating a legal framework for family equality. In the late 1990s, Assemblywoman Carole Migden, a lesbian legislator from San Francisco, sponsored groundbreaking domestic partnership legislation (AB 26) that created the first statewide recognition system for same-sex couples in California. This historic 1999 law granted domestic partners hospital visitation rights and health benefits for government employees—modest beginnings that would grow into comprehensive equality.

Equality California and other groups worked strategically through the legislature to expand domestic partnership rights incrementally. Each legislative session brought new protections: adoption rights, medical decision-making authority, wrongful death claims, and inheritance rights. This careful approach culminated in 2003 with AB 205, authored by lesbian legislator Jackie Goldberg and drafted with input from movement lawyers including Jon Davidson and Jenny Pizer. This comprehensive domestic partnership law granted same-sex couples virtually all the state-based rights and responsibilities of marriage, earning California recognition as having one of the most expansive relationship recognition regimes in the nation.

With domestic partnership in place, California tested even more innovative approaches to workplace equality. Recognizing that directly mandating equal benefits might run afoul of federal law, legislators got creative. In 2001, they required insurance companies to offer equal domestic partner coverage to employers who wanted to provide it. Then, in 2004, Kors—by then Executive Director of Equality California—architected another ingenious solution with AB 2208. This law said that any insurance policy sold in California must treat domestic partners and spouses equally, requiring most employers to either stop providing benefits to married employees or extend them to all committed couples.

During this same period, San Francisco was setting precedents in transgender healthcare. The city made headlines for becoming the first city in the United States to pay for transgender healthcare for uninsured transgender patients. This was achieved through the efforts of Cecilia Chung, who was appointed to the Health Commission by Mayor Edwin (Ed) Lee in 2013. Chung, a groundbreaking advocate for the transgender community and those living with HIV/AIDS, was the first transgender woman and first Asian to be elected to lead the Board of Directors of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration and the first transgender woman and the first person living openly with HIV to chair the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

As legal protections expanded, other pioneering transgender individuals broke more barriers. In 2009, Bamby Salcedo, a Mexican American transgender rights activist, founded the Los Angeles-based TransLatin@Coalition, the first nationwide organization focused on the trans Latine community.

Victoria Kolakowski made history as the first openly transgender person to serve as a trial court judge of general jurisdiction in the United States, elected to the Alameda County Superior Court in 2010.

Lisa Middleton became the first openly transgender person elected in California for a non-judicial position when she won a seat on the Palm Springs City Council in 2017. She later became the first openly transgender mayor in California in 2021.

In 2004, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a nationally prominent Black transgender activist and veteran of the Stonewall riots, became the executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGLIP), which is among the first in the nation to support transgender, gender-variant, and intersex people in prison.

California also played a dramatic role in accelerating the national movement for marriage equality. In early 2004, Mark Leno—the first openly gay man elected to the state senate—introduced the nation’s first marriage equality bill. Later that same day. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, inspired by the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s Goodridge decision, instructed city officials to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Over the course of what became known as the “Winter of Love,” approximately 4,000 same-sex couples married in San Francisco, after decades of being together, creating powerful images of joy and commitment that transformed public understanding of all LGBTQ families. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, two of the most influential lesbian leaders in LGBTQ history, were the first couple to be married.  

This groundswell of activism led to formal legal challenges, ultimately consolidated into the landmark case In re Marriage Cases. A coalition of organizations including the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, and the ACLU—working alongside the San Francisco City Attorney’s office—brought a legal challenge to California’s discriminatory marriage law. In 2008, I had the honor of arguing that case alongside openly lesbian City Attorney Therese Stewart before the California Supreme Court. 

On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court delivered a historic victory in the Marriage Cases, ruling that the state constitution required full marriage equality for same-sex couples. Six months later, with support from powerful anti-LGBTQ funders, that victory was snatched away by Proposition 8, which amended the California Constitution to permit discrimination against same-sex couples in marriage. Once again, Stewart and I argued before the California Supreme Court in Strauss v. Horton (2009), this time to defend the marriages that had already taken place. While the court upheld Proposition 8 prospectively, it ruled that the approximately 18,000 same-sex couples who had married before Proposition 8 remained legally wed. Fifteen years later, in 2024, the constituents of California voted overwhelmingly to repeal Proposition 8, in a measure introduced by openly gay state legislators Scott Wiener and Evan Low.

While marriage equality moved through the courts, California continued expanding protections for transgender people. In 2013, the state enacted America’s first law protecting transgender students—the School Success and Opportunity Act (AB 1266). Introduced by openly gay Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and signed by Governor Jerry Brown, this law declared that every public-school student in California from kindergarten to 12th grade must be “permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity.”

In 2014, the state became the first in the U.S. to officially ban the use of gay and transgender panic defenses in murder trials. In 2016, the legislature passed a statewide equal benefits law (introduced by Senator Leno) requiring California to do business only with companies that offer equal healthcare benefits to transgender people. The state introduced non-binary options on driver’s licenses in 2019, on birth certificates in 2018, and in 2021 became the first state to allow gender-neutral markers on death certificates.

These California innovations created a ripple effect nationwide, inspiring other cities and states to adopt similar measures. Activists like Camille Moran, a transgender poet and painter who advocates against psychiatric abuse of queer and trans youth, represent the ongoing fight for dignity and rights across all LGBTQ communities. In 2012, California became the first state to ban the dangerous and discredited practice of so-called “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ youth, inspiring more than 20 other states to follow suit.

From no recognition in 1999 to comprehensive domestic partnership by 2005 to thousands of legally valid marriages by 2009, and from the first official transgender discrimination hearing in 1994 to comprehensive protections for transgender individuals in schools and healthcare, California has blazed the trail, creating a blueprint for equality that has spread nationwide.

California continues to lead in LGBTQ protections, recently passing laws requiring all K-12 schools to provide accessible all-gender bathrooms, protecting the privacy of transgender youth in court proceedings, prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in nursing home facilities, and strengthening nondiscrimination protections in healthcare. This comprehensive legal framework makes California one of the most protective states for all LGBTQ rights in the United States, establishing it as a model for other states and a refuge for LGBTQ people from less supportive regions of the country.

Shannon Minter, Esq is the Vice President of Legal (Legal Director) of the National Center for LGBTQ+ Rights (NCLR).