The San Francisco Bay Times last month honored numerous Bay Area transgender leaders ahead of the Transgender Day of Visibility. As for Earth Day, a day of this magnitude requires more than 24 hours of recognition. That is especially true here in Northern California, where so many talented transgender leaders are based or have strong ties. Often their leadership extends to national and even international levels.
Here are just a few additional Bay Area transgender leaders who continue to enrich the entire LGBTQ+ community.
Nicky Calma (aka Tita Aida) is the Director of Programs and Community Engagement at the San Francisco Community Health Center (SFCHC), where she is also on the Trans Advisory Committee. She has worked with the SFCHC and its predecessor organization, API Wellness, for the past three decades. Her life has been dedicated to raising HIV awareness in the trans and API communities.
She has organized many clubs and events, and was a longstanding entertainer at the former landmark restaurant Asia SF, being one of the primary “Ladies of Asia SF.” Calma created the persona “Tita Aida” (Tagalog for “Aunty AIDS”) in the early 1990s specifically to destigmatize and break the silence surrounding the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the API LGBTQ+ communities. The Transgender District Visual Storytelling Project created this documentary short about her: https://bit.ly/3FVVT5X
As a fearlessly out transgender woman and activist, Ms. Billie Cooper has devoted much of her life to helping other transgender community members. She is a disabled veteran and cancer survivor as well as a longtime HIV/AIDS survivor (since 1985). After she completed her service in the U.S. Navy, she moved to the Tenderloin in San Francisco in 1982 and never looked back. She told CBS News: “It really wasn’t the transgender district because we weren’t transgender back then; we were still fags and homosexuals and punks and queers and everything. We didn’t get the name transgender until like between 1985 and 1990.” She has transformed her challenges into empathy for others and a drive to make a positive difference in their lives. More about her remarkable life story is included in the documentary short The Life and Legacy of Ms. Billie Cooper, which can be viewed at https://bit.ly/3G0ldHW
Transgender rights activist Donna Personna is a playwright and fine art artist specializing in photography, painting, and mixed media. She was an early inspiration to The Cockettes legendary avant-garde theater group and was featured in one of their films in 1972. Reflecting both her skills in the arts and history within the LGBTQ+ community, she cowrote a play about the Compton Cafeteria riot, which was one of the first documented LGBTQ+-related riots in U.S. history. It is widely credited with marking the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco. In 2018, she raised the first transgender flag at San Francisco City Hall, and has served on the boards of the Trans March and the Transgender Day of Remembrance. She was the Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal of the 2019 San Francisco Pride Parade, with this video sharing more about her life and achievements:
https://bit.ly/42mjunQ
The first transgender woman to sing the National Anthem at a professional sports event, Breonna Sinclairé is an acclaimed lyric soprano who has been working as a professional singer for over a decade. One of her mentors was Sheri Greenawald of the San Francisco Opera. Sinclairé has performed with notable classical artists and orchestras at prestigious venues across the U.S. A few of the operas she has participated in as a vocalist include Carmen, The Magic Flute, La Calisto, and more. She was featured in the PBS special True Colors, where she sang “Somewhere” from West Side Story (https://bit.ly/4ctvtVm). She has been profiled by many media outlets, including NowThis, which produced the following video: https://bit.ly/42AfjG3
Asri Wulandari is a nonbinary transgender asylee from Jakarta, Indonesia. As the Manager of Communications at the Office of Transgender Initiatives (OTI), she believes in the power of storytelling as a tool to uplift and center the transgender community. Prior to joining OTI in 2023, she worked at various nonprofit organizations for many years. To her present work she brings her professional administrative experience from the nonprofit sector in creating an inclusive, effective, and community-centered team. Here at the San Francisco Bay Times, she facilitates Honey Mahogany’s column and has been a thoughtful professional.
Outside of her work at OTI, she is a visual artist working primarily with sculpture and video to investigate her own personal gender identity and its relations to the broader norms, rules, and myths of her communities. She additionally is a DJ and uses that art as an avenue to explore sounds from varying queer and trans artists. In 2022, she was featured in conversation with Dr. Kathy Zarur at the San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery: https://bit.ly/44d1ONN
Published on April 10, 2025
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