Resisting Intensifying Attacks on the LGBTQ Community

One of the most effective strategies of far-right, conservative activism in the United States is the pile-on tactic. The flooding of propaganda, lawsuits, and new legislation attacking everything from higher education to what remains of the social safety net makes it nearly impossible to know how to address each attack in a meaningful way without an endless sense of battle fatigue.

The war against marginalized communities is particularly acute. One of the most robust and virulent attacks on a minoritized community is the Trump administration’s targeting of the LGBTQIA+ community. Since Trump’s inauguration for his second term as President of the United States, there’s been a calculated and well-executed assault on the rights of LGBTQIA+ people that takes its cue from the frenzied and demonstrative pace of Trump’s willingness to malign and stigmatize queer and trans people and communities. There’s no arena, policy, or law safe from the concerted efforts of anti-LGBTQIA+ movements.

From the launch of the queer and trans liberation movements of the late 1960s and 1970s to the milestone legal victories of the twenty-first century such as marriage equality and the ability to choose your sex identification/marker on Social Security records and passport applications, the Herculean efforts of LGBTQIA+ activism radically transformed this nation. While the legal triumphs are remarkable, the cultural reset ushered in by queer and/trans artists, activists, and creators cogently reshaped our collective imagination around families, intimacy, identity, and the possibility of social change. Despite still contending with ongoing discrimination, pervasive systemic inequities, harmful stereotypes, and hate crimes, the early 21st century demarcated a tipping point in queer and trans rights.

The response from those hell-bent on devaluing, dehumanizing, and criminalizing LGBTQIA+ people and communities, however, is intensifying on a daily basis with the full support of the Trump administration and his avid supporters. For them, to “Make America Great Again” requires a return to narrow and exclusionary definitions of marriage and gender. Hatred and fear of queer and/or trans people, often bolstered by Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism, is being re-codified and re-rendered as a cultural norm. It is not enough for those opposed to queer and trans rights that extant disparities and injustices experienced by LGBTQIA+ people persist. Anti-queer and anti-trans elected officials, lobbyists, activists, organizations, and individuals are out to more maliciously marginalize gender and sexual minorities.

How successful has this current wave of anti-LGBTQIA+ activism been thus far? The damage — potential and actualized — feels monstrous. With the stroke of a pen, Trump weakened and removed anti-discrimination policies, banning trans people from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, and blocking gender-affirming care for people enrolled in federal health care programs such as Medicare. These sweeping acts emanating from the most powerful elected official in the country are devastating. In less than a year, the Trump administration and its accompanying socio-cultural MAGA movement rolled back progress tirelessly fought for by generations of LGBTQIA+ activists, organizers, and everyday people. Infuriatingly, what is happening at the federal level is occurring at the local and state levels as well. In Orlando, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly ordered and executed the painting over of a rainbow crosswalk honoring the 49 people killed at Pulse LGBTQ nightclub in 2016. This memorial commemorated one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history and one of the most gut-wrenching, violent attacks on the U.S. LGBTQIA+ community. States such as Arkansas, Montana, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming have passed anti-LGBTQIA+ public accommodations and school facilities bans. These exclusionary and restrictive policies and laws bar people from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity and create a pretext for misgendering, violence, and dehumanization in public spaces.

In October, the Supreme Court seemed prepared to repeal state-level bans on anti-gay conversion therapy. Disregarding mountains of scientific and medical evidence decrying this pseudo-scientific and unabashedly homophobic and transphobic “therapeutic intervention,” the highest court in the land may rule to allow this dangerous and debasing practice as an exercise of a First Amendment right. From the highest court in the land to far-right politicization of commemorative crosswalks, we are witnessing a systemic undoing of strides made towards affirming the rights and humanity of queer and trans people.

We have reached a point of overwhelm. At universities, professors fear teaching about gender beyond a binary because it’s been made a career-ending “offense.” Medical organizations continue to sound the alarm about the shattering consequences of attacks of gender-affirming and trans health care. Health practitioners’ concerns include a rise in suicidal ideation and attempts as well as other negative mental health outcomes among trans and non-binary youth unable to access life-saving, gender-affirming care. Trump has attempted to cut funding to organizations that provide health and support services for LGBTQ+ people, especially people living with HIV. Lawyers and legal organizations committed to protecting and expanding LGBTQIA+ rights are seeing an influx of new cases that would further codify discrimination against queer and trans people. The ACLU is currently tracking nearly three hundred anti-LGBTQIA+ bills across 30 states and Puerto Rico which include curriculum censorship, erecting health care barriers, denying the right to receive accurate identification cards, drag bans, and state-level redefinitions of sex and gender. As a result of this severe climate shift, multiply marginalized queer and trans people — such as Black trans women, poor queer youth, disabled nonbinary people, and unhoused and undocumented queer people — will face even more precarity.

The increase in anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and polices also makes sexual and gender minorities more vulnerable to violence — legally and extralegally. Withholding medical care from someone is a form of violence. The defunding of organizations working with marginalized communities can also lead to violent outcomes. For example, without the crucial services such as employment assistance, daily meals, and having a place to bathe provided by shelters serving queer, gender-variant, and trans people, unhoused LGBTQIA+ are more likely to become victims of violent acts, such as human trafficking. The escalation of anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric from people with large platforms including but not limited to elected officials, religious entities, and popular conservative and far-right podcasts also contributes to an environment in which bigotry toward, prejudice against, and hatred towards LGBTQIA+ people is normalized, and even celebrated. Whether it’s Donald Trump Jr. falsely claiming that the non-existent “radical trans movement” commits more violence than any other group or the Secretary of Defense, Peter Hegseth proclaiming “no more pronouns… No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit,” derisive and demeaning public discourse about queer and trans people is intensifying. These hard-right turns make this country crueler, less inclusive, and more brutalizing.

As many opposed to LGBTQIA+ rights set their sights on the overturning of one of the landmark civil rights cases of modern history, Obergefell vs. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court Case that legalized marriage equality, it is imperative that those of us invested in freedom and equality for all wholly recognize the blistering waters in which we now swim. It is not alarmist to acknowledge that the hard-fought rights struggled for in the last few decades are not protected. If we think that these rights are untouchable, then we will be unprepared for the true nature of the battles that lie ahead. Marginalized communities across the board are facing a far-right revolution that will not stop unless and until we continue fighting back with conviction and in unflappable solidarity.

Impassioned coalescing among those opposing fascist, anti-democratic, and authoritarian policies and rhetoric is happening in mass demonstrations such as No Kings Day protests; in courtrooms across the nation where attorneys contest the legality of codified cruelty; in classrooms on college campuses where faculty refuse to compromise academic freedom and their duty to teach students about difficult histories, inequality, and systemic disparities; in underground networks of doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and therapists committed to providing gender-affirming care to those seeking it; or in newly formed coalitions recognizing connections between mass deportations, mass layoffs, anti-Blacknesss, and reproductive injustice. The more interconnected we see the struggles of marginalized people, the more formidable the resistance against the MAGA agenda will be.