The group was founded in 1993 by transgender activists including
Riki Wilchins and
Denise Norris, in response to the exclusion of transgender people from lesbian, gay, and bisexual
Pride marches.
Media attention The Transexual Menace organized groups of demonstrators outside courthouses during trials involving anti-transgender crimes, for instance in the rape and murder of
Brandon Teena. The movement became the subject of iconic
gay liberation filmmaker
Rosa von Praunheim's documentary "
Transexual Menace".
T-shirts The trademark image for the Transexual Menace was a
Goth-styled black T-shirt with the group's name in blood-dripping red letters. Pictures are available of the Pittsburgh chapter's T-shirts and the Texas chapter's T-shirts.
Esquire interview and response Esquire approached the group to do a piece about transgender activism. It was published under the title "The Third Sex - Now the men who have decided they are actually women are on the march. Welcome to the transgender revolution" on April 1, 1995. The Menace members were angry and the group immediately picketed
Esquire's offices; eventually the writer of the story came down to apologise. In her book
TRANS/gressive, Riki Wilchins describes the incident as reflective of the climate at the time, with "
friendly fire" coming from people or institutions that were not even actively hostile.
The Gay Games The Menace protested
trans women's exclusion from the
Gay Games. Wilchins describes how trans women, unlike the other participants, had to "jump through a series of demeaning hoops" including providing medical records, a hormone test and a full gender verification regime. Six members of the NYC chapter crashed the board meeting of the Gay Games and instantiated a change of these regulations. The transgender-exclusionary regulations were re-instated four years later. ==2025 revival==