SaVanna Wanzer, Founder of D.C. Trans Pride and Black Trans Pride, Has Died at 63

SaVanna Wanzer, the trans rights advocate who founded D.C. Trans Pride in 2007 and was a lead architect of D.C. Black Trans Pride, died on Friday, April 24, of natural causes. She was 63.

If you have been to Trans Pride in Washington, D.C., at any point in the last two decades, you have walked through a space that SaVanna Wanzer made. She did not just attend. She built it — the programming, the volunteer pipeline, the relationships with city government, the year-after-year insistence that trans women, and especially Black trans women, were going to be at the center of every Pride conversation in the District, not the after-thought.

Wanzer was born in 1962 and spent more than three decades organizing in D.C. — at D.C. Black Pride, at Capital Pride, at NMAC (the National Minority AIDS Council), and at smaller, often un-funded community spaces that don’t show up on any organizational chart. She also founded “May Is All About Trans,” a month-long programming track that became a model copied by Pride organizations in other cities.

What she actually built

It is easy, in obituaries, to flatten a person’s career into a list of titles. SaVanna Wanzer’s actual contribution is harder to summarize because so much of it was infrastructural. Some of what she did, as documented by HRC, the Washington Blade, and the trans Pride organizations she helped found:

In 2007, she launched D.C. Trans Pride as a stand-alone event because trans programming kept getting added as the smallest, lowest-resource piece of larger Pride celebrations. Trans Pride D.C. is now one of the longest-running events of its kind in the country. She co-founded D.C. Black Trans Pride to ensure that Black trans women — who have always carried the largest share of risk and the smallest share of resources in the trans movement — had programming, leadership pipelines, and a public platform that did not depend on cis or non-Black gatekeepers. She was a long-time advocate for people living with HIV, particularly Black trans women, who are dramatically over-represented in HIV statistics and dramatically under-represented in HIV decision-making.

She also did the unglamorous work of holding the door open for younger organizers — the part of activism that does not get a press release but is the difference between a movement that compounds and a movement that resets every five years.

The context she organized in

Wanzer’s career bridges two distinct eras of trans organizing in the United States. When she founded D.C. Trans Pride in 2007, “trans Pride” as a category barely existed in most American cities. Federal protections were nonexistent. Most LGBTQ+ organizations did not have a single trans staff member, much less trans leadership. The conversation about Black trans women — about Marsha P. Johnson, about Stonewall, about the people who had always been there — was happening, but only inside the community.

By 2026, the landscape is unrecognizable in some ways and depressingly familiar in others. Trans Pride events run in dozens of US cities. Trans women lead major LGBTQ+ organizations. The cultural visibility is real. But the federal political environment is, by any measure, the most hostile it has been in decades — anti-trans legislation in dozens of states, federal executive orders restricting gender-affirming care, and a Supreme Court that has signaled, repeatedly, that it is comfortable letting much of this stand. Wanzer organized through both eras without losing the thread that the work is the same work: building infrastructure that survives political weather.

What community is saying

The Human Rights Campaign called her “a powerful advocate for the trans community in D.C.” The Washington Blade ran a tribute noting that “even in her final days in the hospital and nursing home, she never lost her sense of humor.” Long-time D.C. organizers have flooded social media with photographs from Trans Pride events going back nearly twenty years — images of a woman who, in nearly every frame, is hugging someone or laughing.

D.C. Black Pride and the Trans Pride Washington D.C. organization have not yet announced memorial details. May Is All About Trans, which Wanzer founded, runs through the end of next month, and the programming this year is expected to include public remembrances.

Why this matters beyond D.C.

For TrueQueer readers outside the United States — especially in places where trans organizing is still finding its footing — the SaVanna Wanzer story is a useful reminder of how much can be built by one stubborn, prepared, well-networked person who refuses to let trans Pride be an afterthought. The institutions she helped found will outlive the political moment. That was the point.

Rest in power, SaVanna Wanzer. The infrastructure is yours.

If you would like to support the work she helped build, donations to D.C. Black Pride and Trans Pride Washington D.C. are publicly accepted. Local D.C. readers can also watch for memorial events announced in May.