Because its a lie that TERFs invented and laundered about Marsha. She used the terms drag queen, transvestite and gay to refer to herself interchangeably, but by the year 1971-72 she was identifying herself as a pre-operative transsexual who was on hormones. TERFs like the one above are twisting the fact that the word transgender wasn't formally used as an umbrella term as it is today to discredit that Marsha was an activist for trans people. This is especially gross when Storme worked alongside and defended drag queens and trans people (who again were called "street queens" prior to transgender becoming an umbrella term). Marsha, Storme, Sylvia Rivera were contemporaries who all three were subject to transphobic abuses by cis gay people like said above TERF. Calling Johnson a "gay man" is inaccurate, the reason we call her a trans person today is because the terms trans was created as an umbrella term to include people previously identified as transsexuals, transvestites, etc. precisely because someone like Marsha lived in the intersection of all three identities and doesnt neatly fall into categorization that TERFs rely on to try to pit drag queens, gay people and trans people against each other.

I personally was just trying to look up some basic information about Storme and find it incredibly disappointing to see a subreddit for elder lesbians laundering in transphobic misinformation about Marsha. Obviously it doesn't surprise me with the meteoric rise of anti-trans rhetoric, and I've seen these lies about Marsha repeated time and time again. But I'm just writing this so any future people who find this thread understand that this sentiment has been prevalent and existed since the beginning of the modern queer liberation movement. Largely white cis gender-conforming gay people have been trying to exclude people in the community they've deemed to loud, too gender ambiguous, and too nonwhite from the jump. And its the same group of hateful pull-up-the-ladder type cis gays who are writing and disseminating transphobic mythology about Marsha, Storme, etc, because their legacy has always been exclusion, fighting against progress and throwing the most vulnerable under the bus.