San Francisco’s largely symbolic sanctuary resolution reiterates the city’s commitment to protecting access to gender-affirming care and protection for its providers, in line with the state.
“With the unprecedented level of attacks we are experiencing on trans rights and bodily autonomy, more and more people will be flocking to places like San Francisco,” Honey Mahogany, the director of San Francisco’s Office of Transgender Initiatives, said. “We are already seeing the impact of these policies lead to an increase in demands for services.”
San Francisco is the largest city in the U.S. to make such a declaration. It is also home to the first legally recognized transgender district in the world, which Mahogany helped create. Along with Janetta Johnson and Aria Sa’id, Mahogany founded Compton’s Transgender Cultural District, an eight-block zone in the southeastern part of San Francisco’s Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods, in 2017.
The district is located around Compton’s Cafeteria, the location of the first documented uprising of queer people in the U.S. in 1966, three years before the Stonewall Riots.
Breonna McCree, the current co-executive director of the Transgender District, said that the city has been a place for the transgender community to “live, play and thrive” since the 1940s and ’50s.
“This decision kind of just brings everything home for me because San Francisco is home for us,” McCree said. “San Francisco has been thought of as a safe space for the trans community for a while, and I think this [resolution] sends a message to the rest of the country that we will take care of our trans and nonbinary people here.”
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