Hope Sinks

Pride Month is almost upon us. But this year, the usual glut of ticketed parties and parades ought to be somber and, even, angry affairs. For in the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, there is little to celebrate and much to mourn. Queer Americans are facing a veritable tidal wave of transphobic and homophobic policy, which has cascaded down from state, local, and federal government since the start of the year. We are, to put it plainly, in the middle of a state-sanctioned campaign of repression directed against trans and queer people unparalleled since the days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare some seventy years ago.

Where do we even begin? The assault has been relentless since Trump reentered the Oval Office. The day he was inaugurated, the president signed an executive order “Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The measure dictates the risible belief that there are only two sexes, which are determined at conception and identifiable by sexual anatomy. A little over a week later, Trump signed another order directing the attorney general to investigate and even prosecute teachers who assist the “social transition of a minor student,” which the order defines to include use of a student’s preferred name or pronoun. While such charges may not hold up in court, the order creates a chilling effect, dissuading teachers from openly supporting their trans students—who are already at far higher risk for depression and suicide precisely because they are singled out for this kind of harassment. The new administration has also sought to ban trans soldiers in the military, block trans Americans from receiving passports with their correct gender marker (and sparked fears of passport seizures), withdraw funds from schools that promote an ill-defined “gender ideology,” and ban trans girls and women from female sports.

At the same time, Republican state governments, those laboratories of authoritarianism, have continued to advance more and more radical legislation. In March, for instance, the West Virginia House of Delegates approved a bill that would give school physicians the authority to “physically examine” a minor in order to determine their biological sex—without the consent of that child’s parents. After backlash, this “Child Genital Inspection” provision was stripped from the measure, but the legislation, designed to bar trans youth from accessing bathrooms consistent with their gender, still passed into law the following day. “West Virginia will not bow down to radical gender ideology,” the Republican governor pledged as he signed the bill into law. Likewise, Republican legislators in Arkansas recently proposed a law that would grant citizens the right to sue anyone who facilitated—or even acknowledged—a minor’s gender transition, whether by using their preferred pronouns, enabling them to wear their preferred clothing, or giving them their preferred haircut.

Indeed, over eight hundred anti-trans bills have been introduced across the country since the start of the year. That figure already far outstrips the total number of anti-trans bills introduced in 2024 and is more than quadruple the figure for 2022. These measures amount to nothing short of a campaign of persecution directed at one of the country’s smallest and most vulnerable minorities.

But it doesn’t stop with trans people. Republican state legislators have begun exploring ways to further erode same-sex marriage. At the start of its legislative session this year, the Idaho House of Representatives approved a measure that calls on the Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that granted marriage equality, and to “restore the natural definition of marriage.” And the Court recently agreed to hear a challenge to Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. The conservative supermajority appears likely to overturn the statute on First Amendment grounds. There is also growing concern over what will happen should the court reverse Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that overturned sodomy laws around the country. Twelve states still retain unenforceable sodomy statutes, often dubbed “zombie” laws, that would suddenly come back into force should the Justices revisit Lawrence. In some of these states, Republican legislators have been unwilling to repeal these dead-letter provisions. In 2022, Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, told reporters that he would enforce the state’s sodomy law if the Court reversed its opinion.

Those who hope to recriminalize sodomy have taken heart in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Three years ago, the conservative Justice argued that the Court should revise not only Obergefell and Lawrence but also the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which allowed married couples access to birth control and thereby established a federal right to privacy. Reversing these decisions would return the country to the sexual and gender politics of seven decades ago.

The federal bureaucracy, too, has made worrisome moves when it comes to policy affecting gay men and lesbians. Soon after the president ousted the board of the Kennedy Center, it called off a planned performance by the gay men’s chorus of Washington, D.C. and has since cancelled all Pride events scheduled to take place there in early June. The administration has canceled hundreds of grants related to HIV and AIDS research and cut a key office at the CDC tasked with HIV and AIDS prevention. The agency even briefly scrubbed HIV-related content, including pages about PrEP, from its site as part of the administration’s crackdown on so-called gender ideology. Among the alleged gang members illegally deported to an El Salvadoran concentration camp last month was a gay refugee who had fled violence in Venezuela. No one has heard from him since March 14. The following week, the Department of Health and Human Services revealed plans to eliminate the national suicide and crisis hotline’s program for LGBTQ youth.

Across American society, we are starting to see the ripple effects of these policies. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who first made a name for himself by granting same-sex marriage certificates as mayor of San Francisco, stunned political observers when he insisted in an interview with conservative commentator Charlie Kirk that it was “deeply unfair” for trans girls to complete in female sports. Likewise, the National Collegiate Athletic Association quickly complied with the administration’s athletics order, mandating that only those assigned female at birth would be eligible to compete in women’s college sports. Companies are rolling back support for next month’s Pride celebrations after years of support. Meta, the social media company that owns Facebook, recently announced open season on trans and queer people: its new speech rules specify that users are free to say that LGBTQ people are “mentally ill.” The tide has undoubtedly shifted—but we don’t yet know just how high the waters will rise. 

By many metrics, the United States remains a relatively LGBTQ-friendly country. According to Gallup, support for same-sex marriage remains high among voters as does support for same-sex acts remaining legal. Around 20 percent of young people identify as LGBTQ, the highest such figure since Gallup started tracking it in 2012. When it comes to trans policy, most Americans favor extending nondiscrimination protections to trans people.

This consensus first coalesced around a decade ago, when things appeared far more optimistic. The country was riding the crest of what seemed like the most rapidly successful human rights movement in history. After the 2003 Lawrence decision, it only took a decade until the watershed United States v. Windsor ruling, which held the Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional, thereby compelling the federal government and states to honor same-sex marriages performed in any state (a ruling later enshrined in the Respect for Marriage Act signed by former President Joe Biden in December 2022). Only two more years later, in 2015, the Obergefell decision established a constitutional right to marriage, allowing queer couples across the country to wed. Less than a year after that, the Obama White House turned, if a bit tentatively, to trans rights. Attorney General Loretta Lynch delivered an impassioned speech at the Justice Department, in which she told trans Americans, “We see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you.”

Yet, even as queer Americans feted a string of court victories, and even as mainstream culture started to embrace queerness, rumblings of discontent grew. In 2018, Martin Duberman asked “has the gay movement failed?” in a provocative book of the same title. Two years into Trump’s first term, the disgruntled historian fretted that some activists had been too eager to embrace a narrow set of rights in exchange for giving up a more sweeping vision of queer liberation. In place of the anger that animated the post-Stonewall movement, we were given pride, an anodyne placeholder that signaled little more than nominal tolerance in a hostile world. Instead of fighting for a world free of any form of oppression, LGBTQ people had been bought off with marriage and the military and were now content, in the words of queer theorist Lisa Duggan, to “go home and cook dinner, forever.”

But despite the first Trump administration’s efforts to roll back protections for trans Americans, the legalistic, rights-based strategy of the queer movement still seemed to be working. Transphobic legislation mostly stalled in courts. Calls on the party fringes to reverse the Obergefell and Windsor decisions went nowhere. In 2020, Neil Gorsuch—a conservative who Trump had appointed to the Supreme Court—authored a stunning opinion holding that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did indeed protect trans and gay employees from discrimination. Despite the administration’s best efforts, it seemed unlikely that the gains of the previous decade would, or could, be rolled back. 

More recently, however, the modern queer rights movement’s greatest weapon has transformed into its Achilles heel. What lent the movement speed over the last several decades was a strategy of going through the courts. Mirroring the legalistic feminism of figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who argued cases before the Supreme Court before joining its ranks, queer advocates were able to convince prominent legal theorists and, ultimately, judges that federal law and the Constitution should protect the interests and rights of gay and lesbian Americans. Marriage, in particular, became the narrow end of a wedge: if queer people were granted the right to wed, it would be impossible, the thinking went, to withhold other rights or to continue to discriminate against them.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, this strategy was highly contested. Many thinkers, such as Duberman, were convinced that it would ultimately fail, that banking on marriage not only robbed queer activism of its potential but was also a losing strategy in the short-term. Eventually, though, a string of resounding court victories seemed to prove the skeptics wrong. By working through the courts and elite opinion, the movement appeared to succeed in changing the realities of queer life in astonishingly short order. Yet, it meant that there was no need to convince a broader electorate, persuade legislatures, or build a new public consensus. The strategy short-circuited the democratic process. At the same time, it allowed Democratic politicians to hide behind judicial robes, only sticking their necks out long after it was safe to do so. This two-step inculcated a mendacious timidity among liberal politicians, especially when it came to the question of trans rights. Many of them wanted a successful civil rights movement to which to hitch their wagons, but only if it wasn’t too controversial.

The same went for the party’s corporate backers, who embraced rainbow capitalism with gusto. Indeed, the brand of queer rights supported by the Democratic Party was especially attractive to the corporate world because it required vanishingly little effort. Hiring queer and trans people into corporate roles, slapping a rainbow onto logos in June, and making a few donations to the Human Rights Campaign—none of this threatened corporate profits. It did, however, give those corporations an easy win with their progressive customers and stockholders. Yet, their support was nothing more than a finger to the winds of elite opinion.

In the abrupt—but not entirely unsurprising—volte face of Gavin Newsom, a governor who was never more than a winning smile, we can see the dividends that this strategy has paid. Elite opinion can change rapidly. That is, after all, what the activists who began pushing for marriage equality several decades ago were banking on. But it can shift into reverse just as quickly. 

Where will we go from here? Historians are notoriously bad at predicting the future, and I make no claim to be able to do so. But I see three general possibilities for how things might develop.

Let’s start with the worst. It is entirely possible that Trumpism continues to radicalize over the next several years or even decades. In a kind of permanent revolution—for which we have historical examples from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa to Argentina in the Cold War—ever more radical sects drive the movement further to the right. Leaders of such political movements are usually ravenous for scapegoats, requiring villains on whom to pin blame for their constituents’ deteriorating standard of living. In this case, the government’s persecution of trans and queer people would continue to worsen: trans people could be forcibly de-transitioned and perhaps sent to extrajudicial medical institutions or penal colonies. Same-sex relations could be outlawed. These are not unlikely or far-off scenarios. Conservatives have plainly stated that their goal is the “eradication of transgenderism from public life.” The Texas Republican Party platform declares that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.” A GOP congressman recently praised Uganda’s anti-homosexuality law, which mandates the death penalty, and Trump has been advised by Christian organizations that want to recriminalize sodomy.

But it would not stop with LGBTQ people: any gender expression or sexual act considered threatening to procreative heterosexuality would come under attack. Porn could be criminalized, as Project 2025 envisions. Birth control might be banned. Heterosexual anal intercourse, oral sex, and sex out of wedlock could all face legal scrutiny. In this future, the Christian nationalists driving the train would be determined to return to a medieval definition of sodomy, one that encompasses all non-procreative sex. At the same time, women could be stripped of political, social, and sexual agency by a political movement that has already begun to call for women to be disenfranchised and for no-fault divorce to be outlawed.

The second route would be stagnation. In this case, a new equilibrium would establish itself after the political passion of the MAGA movement burned itself out. More pragmatic leaders would reign in the party’s most radical elements. A conservative government would be left firmly in power, likely some sort of oligarchic authoritarian hybrid. This scenario might look a great deal like the 1950s, with a restricted public sphere, limited electorate, and conservative gender norms. Queer and trans people would likely face legal harassment and even forms of criminalization, but they would also be able to carve out subcultures and begin to advocate for the rights they had lost since 2024. Wealthy and privileged queer people, mostly cisgender gay men, would face fewer impediments. Some, such as conservatives Peter Thiel or Richard Grenell, might even be trotted out by the regime as evidence that there was no discrimination against LGBTQ people.

The final option, which I fear is the least likely, is that the administration overreaches dramatically, going too far too fast, and sparking its own counter-backlash. The most far-reaching policies advocated by the far right are massively unpopular, and Trump has made clear that he does not care much about LGBTQ issues. Even the question of trans participation in sports he has indicated is nothing more than a convenient wedge issue. If progressives can make clear that these policies are nothing more than cynical ploys to distract from the administration’s efforts to dismantle what remains of our welfare state while also highlighting these politicians’ radical aims, it seems possible that voters may act. They may not vote to protect their trans neighbor or their lesbian colleague, but they may do so to protect their Social Security checks or their right to access birth control. Our recent history, however, does not leave me optimistic.

Next month, Pride marches will take to the nation’s streets once more, dimmed but not extinguished. Rainbow flags will fly and clubs will open their doors, even if the media averts its gaze and large corporations pull their funds. For decades now, Pride has radiated a message of hope that things will, inevitably, get better. But what hope is possible in the midst of such an onslaught? Perhaps, though, hope was never the right emotion to which to hitch a political movement. Perhaps ours will be a summer not of pride but of rage.