One ongoing struggle in the LGBTQ community has been the relationship between transgender people and LGB people–and in the 70s, the specifically gay and/or lesbian groups that controlled what few resources there were.
This short column shows multiple sides of this dynamic: even as trans people won admission into the San Francisco Gay Activists Alliance, a major SF LGBTQ organization, they sought that vote only after a trans person was turned away from the Society for Individual Rights. And as the article notes, organizational options for trans people–especially trans women of color, and especially those who were poor or resorted to sex work–were limited, as one of the few trans-specific organizations caught a lot of flack for being run by an SFPD officer.
Although we have no details on the person who was turned away, based on the Berkeley Barb’s positive record on gendering people correctly when discussing them, it’s probably reasonable to believe that this was, in fact, a trans man who is being gendered correctly, especially given that he does not seem to have been seeking access to a lesbian-specific organization.