Transgender Day of Visibility was founded in 2009 by Michigan activist Rachel Crandall Crocker to provide trans folks with “a special day for us” and went on, as the trans rights movement grew, to become so widely honored that President Joe Biden began issuing White House proclamations marking the day in 2021.
What a difference an election can make. Today, transgender communities are under attack as never before at both the state and national levels. With that in mind, I wanted to check in with three trans-supporting efforts I first wrote about in 2022 to see how they’re doing in these regressive times.
The stories that leaders of these efforts related to me about their past few years illustrate the growing pains inherent in creating and sustaining funding efforts for marginalized communities, particularly when those communities are facing danger. While trans-supportive community organizing has been happening in this country for decades, the vast majority of the organizations and funders that support this work are both comparatively small and relatively new. This makes them particularly vulnerable to changing political tides and shifts in established funders’ priorities — in sharp contrast to the deep pockets that allowed anti-trans organizations to spend $215 million on anti-trans attack ads during the 2024 election alone.
The story of the Black Trans Travel Fund’s past three years is particularly instructive. When Inside Philanthropy first profiled BTTF in 2022, the scrappy, New York-based funder had already moved $350,000 to Black trans women in need since its launch in 2019. Originally founded to provide funds for safe ground transportation, such as Ubers and taxis, for Black trans women in New York City, the group had grown to take on other projects, such as a book club and a program helping Black trans women apply for passports reflecting their gender identity.
By 2025, co-Director and founder Devin Lowe told me, the total figure since launch had grown to more than $600,000 and the scope of the organization has broadened to include international work. In addition to providing funding for safe ground transportation in the U.S., Lowe said his organization’s current work includes providing monetary support for six shelters for Black trans people overseas — four in Kenya and two in Uganda — and funds to individuals and organizations in African countries for basic needs such as rent, food and water, gas for cooking and security cameras. “There have also been times we’ve paid medical bills for women who were attacked, and bail for women who were arrested,” Lowe said.
BTTF is sponsoring Transgender Day of Visibility events to support its grantees in Uganda, Cuba and Tanzania, and launched an Instagram Live series late last year to hold up its work and that of some of its grantees. But despite its best efforts, today, the organization finds itself struggling on multiple fronts. BTTF has halted its work supporting transgender women with passport applications while waiting on the outcome of an ACLU lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s rollback of the two-year-old practice of allowing trans people to get passports reflecting their gender identity.
In addition, the Black Trans Travel Fund has lost its major source of foundation support, the Black Trans Fund, after BTF separated from its first home at the Groundswell Fund last year and paused grantmaking.
That development “is a really big concern for us because we had been talking about receiving multi-year funding from them, but now that’s no longer on the table,” Lowe said. Currently, Lowe said BTTF doesn’t have any large donors, hasn’t been receiving many grants, and has been pushing out more money than it’s taking in.
BTTF has hired a grantwriter and is planning a capital campaign, but Lowe said the organization will be forced to pause more of its programs unless something changes soon.
Which brings us back to the Black Trans Fund. In 2022, BTF was celebrating two years as a project of the Groundswell Fund and had just closed a round of grant applications for a $725,000 allocation. At the time, Groundswell and BTF had a five-year plan that involved moving $5 million to Black, trans-led nonprofits and launching the Black Trans Fund as an independent entity in 2025. A Groundswell spokesperson told Inside Philanthropy that from 2020 to 2024, the fund moved just over $4.8 million in grants.
Though the giving nearly met the target, the plan to launch BTF this year as an independent entity went off course. Neither Groundswell nor Black Trans Fund founder Bré Rivera provided Inside Philanthropy with details about the reasons, but rather than spinning off this year as planned, the Black Trans Fund separated from Groundswell in November 2024 and is now fiscally sponsored by the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP (Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project) Black Trans Cultural Center, a San Francisco-based Groundswell grantee.
Rivera said that BTF plans on resuming grantmaking this year, and cited support from the Surdna, Kresge and Libra foundations and passionate individual donors as the reason her organization’s work will move forward. At the same time, she said she is also aware that the abrupt transition away from Groundswell means that the Black Trans Fund is going to have to rebuild trust with the community it serves and do some capacity building and organizational development work as it gets its feet back on the ground. “There’s a lot of organizing that will have to happen for us to be able to go back to business as usual,” Rivera said.
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Rivera stressed that she wants to plan intentionally for what comes next for the Black Trans Fund. “One of my critiques in movement is that sometimes, I feel like we dream really big, but then when it comes down to actualization, we are very cart before horse,” she said. “So we will sit on the cart, people will be passing us up, and we’re like, ‘Why aren’t we moving?’ And it’s like, ‘Girl, it’s because we didn’t actually think to get the horse!’ Right? What I’m trying to do is slow down and get really good at making sure that we have the protections in place” to do BTF’s work in a way that best serves its communities.
At the same time, it’s clear that Rivera isn’t interested in what she sees as traditional grantmaking.
“I don’t know if I think of BTF as a philanthropic intervention or model anymore,” she said. “I think of it more as us taking up space in a place where folks have trusted us with resources, and moving that to our folks in a way that doesn’t cause them a burden, [and] doesn’t cause them to have to perform or be something that they’re not.”
While the Black Trans Travel Fund struggles to continue supporting people who rely on it and the Black Trans Fund is figuring out its next moves, one trans-focused funding effort — Funders for LGBTQ Issues’ Grantmakers United for Trans Communities (GUTC) Pledge — has grown stronger since Inside Philanthropy first profiled the initiative in 2022.
Back then, the pledge, which commits signatories to efforts such as giving more money to trans-serving groups and publicly expressing support for and solidarity with trans communities, had 53 signatories. That’s more than double the number of funders that came on board when the pledge was launched in 2018. GUTC Project Director Luna Moreta Avila told me that, since she started her position in mid-2023, 10 new signatories have joined the effort. The pledge has also begun welcoming philanthropy-serving organizations, and a number of them, including Women’s Funding Network and the Disability & Philanthropy Forum, have come on board.
This success, however, hasn’t exempted Funders for LGBTQ Issues from the generalized fear and hesitation that seems to be gripping much of the philanthrosphere, particularly among funders involved in pushing for and protecting equal rights and protections for racial, sexual and other minority communities.
“At this moment, we’re seeing a lot of foundations freeze in fear when we need them to step up,” Avila said. “We have been heartened to see a few pledge signatories publicly commit to staying the course despite the assaults we are seeing, including the Arcus Foundation and Third Wave Fund. Still, there is a lot more work to be done.”
That work is particularly urgent at a time when so many nonprofits “are reeling from the loss of government funding for their community, research and healthcare access programs for trans people,” Avila said. “Without philanthropy stepping up, so much life-saving work will be at risk of disappearing at a crucial moment.”
“We also know that protecting trans safety, bodily autonomy and rights is inseparable from the broader priority of safeguarding the foundational democratic rights and norms that we believe all communities deserve in this pivotal moment,” she added.
When I first began covering transgender communities just over 20 years ago, the movement for trans equality faced such an uphill battle that trans folks even had to fight for recognition and support from some of the organizations founded to support other queer people. There has been an amazing amount of progress in the intervening two decades, but those advances are under direct threat as an extremely well-funded movement of anti-trans organizations and Republican politicians has come to dominate the conversation on trans rights to the degree that public support, which was admittedly soft, has been shifting against this already-marginalized and vulnerable group.
If there is one potential bright spot in the current landscape, it’s that many of the faces of the anti-trans movement are the same leaders rolling back abortion rights, LGB equality and virtually every advance in racial and gender equity achieved in the U.S. over the past 70 years. A unified fight by funders, Democratic politicians and the general public on every equity front would also benefit the struggle for transgender equality.
