[3][5] The Effeminists was a consciousness-raising group born out of the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, by GLF members Kenneth Pitchford, John Knoebel, and Steven Dansky.
The Effeminists pointed out that poor treatment and sexual harassment towards women in the movement was occurring in many New Left organizing spaces, and that without addressing it, liberation could not be achieved.
[3] Two years prior, in 1971, University of California, Berkeley students Jim Rankin and Nick Benton launched a newspaper entitled, "The Effeminist".
[10] As a small group, literature distribution was important to the Effeminists, as it enabled them to increase their reach to others within the gay liberation movement and the New Left through magazines or essays.
[13] Members of The Flaming Faggots Collective alleged his political opinions of feminist and gay topics to be homophobic and misogynistic.
[4][7][15] Many years later, leaders such as Pitchford and Dansky expressed that those views were incorrect; particularly, that transgender people have an expanded, rather than a reduced, understanding of gender.
[3][15] In an essay reflecting on the Effeminists, Steve Dansky recalls, "I found their [transgender people’s] narratives compelling and challenged the social construction of an immutable binary gendered world.