San Francisco’s Transgender District is mounting a fundraising drive to offset losses from government funding cuts to services vital to its founding mission.
It’s a change in strategy forced on LGBTQ+ community groups nationwide as the Trump administration’s assault on queer identities includes the freezing of congressionally approved federal grants, a move widely deemed as illegal.
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Those losses are trickling down to state and local governments, as well. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s latest budget slashes nonprofit grants and other contracts by more than $170 million in an effort to shore up city finances in the face of further funding threats by the Trump administration.
The Transgender District, comprising six square blocks in San Francisco’s downtown Tenderloin neighborhood, was founded in 2017 during Trump’s first term in office. It’s the only legally recognized cultural district of its kind in the world.
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To address the cuts, the Transgender District is launching the Riot Fund, a three-year emergency campaign to raise at least $100,000. The drive’s goal is to restore services now on hold and move away from a history of government reliance.
The fund got a high-profile debut yesterday at the District’s annual Riot Party, commemorating the historic Compton’s Cafeteria Riots in 1966, when transgender patrons fought back against serial abuse by San Francisco cops.
The party was co-produced by the District and the all-Black drag show “Reparations,” with headliners including “Reparations” founder and Drag Queen of the Year Nicki Jizz, plus Jax, Militia Scunt, Afrika America, Redbone, and Bettyie Jayne. RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Naomi Smalls was also among the featured talent.
“As the world’s first and only legally recognized transgender cultural district, we have spent the past eight years building a global model for how cities can invest in and uplift trans communities with intention and impact,” the group says in their fundraising appeal. “Yet today, as funding sources disappear and our financial challenges grow more severe, we have been forced to scale back the very services that so many trans and nonbinary people rely on.”
Programs under threat include the District’s signature Entrepreneurship Accelerator, the Social Justice Fellowship, and the Community Advisory Council. Wellness and safety programs, as well as name- and gender marker- change clinics, are also struggling amid the cuts.
“This administration doesn’t want to fund anything having to do with LGBT communities, especially the T,” Carlo Gomez Arteaga, one of the District’s co-executive directors, told the San Francisco Chronicle of Trump’s broad assault on marginalized groups. “They don’t want to have any funding go towards diversity and equity initiatives or anything that favors a particular minority, even if lifting up the most marginalized lifts everyone up.”
District leaders described the Riot Fund as an attempt to protect what has already been built.
Co-executive director Breonna McCree told Axios funding was more vital than ever as a “great migration” of trans and nonbinary people fleeing red states arrives in the city. The District’s rent stabilization program, established to ease housing costs as new arrivals settle in to San Francisco, is one of the programs now on hold.
“Our community is very nuanced, and we need different pathways for entry to support,” co-executive director Carlo Gómez Arteaga said. “The more pathways to entry to support, the greater likelihood that person will get the support systems that they need.”
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