Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton announced her support for gay marriage. Placid and well-coiffed, she looked at the camera with Clintonian firmness, and said, “L.G.B.T. Americans are our colleagues, our teachers, our soldiers, our friends, our loved ones, and they are full and equal citizens and deserve the rights of citizenship. That includes marriage.”

That Monday, she joined the ranks of prominent Democrats—and even a share of prominent Republicans—in the righteous chorus seeking to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, which her husband signed in 1996. (Not known for his penitence, Bill Clinton published an op-ed asserting that the law “is itself discriminatory” and “should be overturned.”) Whether the law is struck down now, as DOMA is challenged before the Supreme Court, or years later—when the seventy per cent of under-thirty voters who support marriage equality rise up in age and power—there is no doubt, as Jeffrey Toobin wrote last week in the magazine, that nothing now “can reverse the march toward equality.”

There is a question, however, in the language Clinton used, the particular lip service she chose to pay. The United States moves inexorably toward granting equality to the L.G.B., but in the process—while still pronouncing that satisfying final consonant—we often, in practice, drop the “T.”

In New York, where in 1969 the riots at the Stonewall Inn launched the movement, the privileging of only L.G.B. rights is telling. In 2002, in order to get a hard-fought non-discrimination bill passed, gay and lesbian activists in New York stopped fighting for provisions related to their transgender allies. The bill, the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (“SONDA”), made it illegal to discriminate against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the exercise of civil rights. Meanwhile, State Senator Tom Duane, the leading sponsor of the original draft, which had extended trans rights, decried the “terrible, horrible discrimination” that transgender people face: “They risk public exposure and loss of jobs, and sometimes violence, loss of homes.” Over ten years later, a Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (“GENDA”) is still not law.

No federal law offers protection to transgender people from discrimination in the workplace; the population sees double the usual rate of unemployment, and ninety per cent of transgender individuals report harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination at work. The great majority of states do not assure access to public accommodations, including hospitals, for transgender people. In 2011, the largest-ever study of transgender Americans showed that nineteen per cent of transgender or gender-nonconforming people had been denied health care. Similar rates have been refused a home or apartment because of their gender identity. Twenty-eight per cent of those in the study reported being subject to harassment in medical settings, and a full forty-one per cent reported attempting suicide (this compared to 1.6 per cent in the general population). Seventy-eight per cent of transgender people in kindergarten through twelfth grade are subject to harassment. In a community with staggeringly high rates of H.I.V. infection and levels of homelessness approaching four times the national average, health care is urgently needed.

Slowly, attitudes are changing. Margaret Talbot wrote for this magazine on the complex issues faced by sensitive and open parents who, as legal guardians, have to make decisions for their children that will affect their biology, fertility, and identity. Members of the Phi Alpha Tau fraternity at Boston’s Emerson College launched a campaign in February to finance female-to-male top surgery for Donnie Collins, a transgender sophomore and new brother in the fraternity.

But protections count most on the legislative level. When laws like GENDA are introduced, uniformly conservative politicians and religious-affiliated groups raise the “bathroom issue”—the menace of sexual predators in restrooms and locker rooms. When a transgender-rights bill was introduced in Massachusetts in 2011, a radio spot paid for by the Massachusetts Family Institute ran in which one mother tells another that, if the “bathroom bill” passes, it won’t be safe for her daughter to go to the bathroom by herself anymore. The same week that Hillary Clinton voiced her support for L.G.B.T. rights, Representative John Kavanagh, a Republican in the Arizona State Legislature, introduced a bill that would make it illegal for a transgender person to use a bathroom that does not match the sex on his or her birth certificate. Kavanagh dropped the measure—dubbed the “bathroom birther” bill—in the face of wide opposition, but not before defending it on Phoenix’s 12 News, saying that it “raises the spectre of people who want to go into those opposite sex facilities not because they’re transgender, but because they’re weird.”

At the same time, there have been concerns that the advance of marriage equality might, however counterintuitively, mean a slackening of attention for full L.G.B.T. rights—particularly rights for the “T.” After gay marriage became legal in New York, in 2011, the chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, Pauline Park, told the Huffington Post, “The more privileged gay white men who live in Manhattan are more likely to open up their checkbooks” for same-sex marriage than for transgender rights.

Last week, during the oral arguments in the two marriage cases before the Supreme Court, the Human Rights Campaign stepped up a drive to get people to change their Facebook profile pictures and Twitter avatars to a red equality sign, or some matzo-infused (it was also Passover) or Sesame Street variation thereof. A few million—a fairly staggering number of Facebook users—seem to have done so. But, in the midst of the arguments, there were also what the H.R.C., in an apology, called “two unfortunate incidents” at the demonstration it helped organize in front of the Court: “In one case, a trans activist was asked to remove the trans pride flag from behind the podium, and in another, a queer undocumented speaker was asked to remove reference to his immigration status in his remarks.” The statement went on to say that those involved had “personally” said they were sorry, and also that the group was apologizing “to those who were hurt by our actions…. we will strive to do better in the future. Through both our legislative and programmatic work, HRC remains committed to making transgender equality a reality.”

The organization might need more than a statement to make its commitment to “coalitional” politics clear; one reason the incidents at the marriage rally resonated is the sense that H.R.C., going back to the nineties, has “a long history of throwing trans people under the bus.” H.R.C.’s decision, for example, to present a “corporate equality” award to Goldman Sachs despite employees’ support for conservative politicians has fed into a sense that the major gay-rights organizations might be more interested in corporate comfort than in fighting trans discrimination.

Facebook profile pictures sporting bold equal signs, it can be assumed, will change back once DOMA is overturned (or if it’s not), and the public will move on. L.G.B.T. people, in their and our full diversity, will still not have been afforded the full rights of citizenship. More marginal, more “at risk,” and more controversial life styles still feel less salient, and less politically appealing.

Illustration by Richard McGuire.

[#image: /photos/5909519dc14b3c606c1038ea]Read our full coverage of gay marriage before the Supreme Court.