Leaders in the LGBTQ+ rights movement are taking stock and looking for lessons after a difficult few years.
When the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell vs. Hodges case 10 years ago that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, the sense of triumph was palpable. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and courthouses were flooded with newlyweds.
But that wasn’t the only response.
Opponents of LGBTQ+ rights immediately began implementing new strategies to limit the decision’s reach and reverse the broader momentum toward LGBTQ+ acceptance, including by casting a small, less understood subset of the queer community — transgender people — as a growing threat to American families and values.
“Right after Obergefell, every effort to advance any equality measure was met with an anti-trans backlash,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ legal rights.
In statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, the number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have increased year after year, with 800 being introduced this year alone. The Trump administration also has embraced the shift, with federal agencies aggressively investigating California and threatening its funding over its trans-inclusive policies. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
The White House is lighted in rainbow colors in 2015 after the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)
The strategy has delighted many conservatives. But it has also frightened a community that had seen itself as being on a path toward progress, reviving discussions about the legacy of the Obergefell decision and igniting a fierce debate within the community about the wisdom of its political strategy over the past decade.
Some have questioned whether the efforts since Obergefell to broaden transgender rights were pursued too fast, too soon, playing into the hands of the movement’s political foes. Others say those concerns sound strikingly similar to ones raised during the fight for marriage equality, when some argued that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions to avoid alienating religious moderates.
The conversation is not a comfortable one. Nerves are raw and fear is palpable. Some worry that pointing the finger will further embolden those working to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights. But others argue that a strategic reassessment is necessary after years of setbacks.
“This can be an inflection point for how we move forward — whether we galvanize resources in [an] aligned effort to push back, [or] continue to let ourselves be divided by campaigns and movements and strategies that seek to divide us,” Strangio said. “That’s the real question for this moment.”
The shifting debate
Strangio, now co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, had worked on the Obergefell case and was outside the Supreme Court the day the decision came down. He thought about his younger self, and how impossible such a ruling would have seemed just years before — when state marriage bans were sweeping the country.
But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the victory, he said, as it became clear “within minutes” that anti-LGBTQ+ forces were already regrouping and preparing for the next fight.
One of their first targets was transgender people’s use of public bathrooms. Within months of the Obergefell decision, voters in Houston rejected an anti-discrimination measure after opponents falsely claimed that the ordinance’s gender-identity protections would allow sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms.
In 2016, North Carolina passed the nation’s first law barring transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their identities. The measure sparked huge backlash and statewide boycotts, led in part by corporate America — and the bill was rolled back in 2017.
People gather in North Carolina in 2016 to protest the state’s restrictive bathroom bill.
(Emery P. Dalesio / Associated Press)
LGBTQ+ activists were jubilant, viewing North Carolina’s embarrassment as a clear sign that history was on their side and that expanded transgender rights and protections were inevitable. And there would be big wins to come — including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination nationwide.
However, the tide was already beginning to shift, including as right-wing groups began to identify specific transgender issues that resonated with voters more than bathrooms, and as Trump — in his first term — began taking aim at transgender rights.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his organization “poll tested all of these issues, the bathrooms, the showers, the locker rooms,” and found that many were “incredibly unpopular to voters” — but some more than others.
One of the issues that resonated the most, Schilling said, was kids’ healthcare and competition in girls sports. So his group ran with that, including in the 2019 race for governor in Kentucky, when it ran an ad suggesting the Democratic candidate and ultimate victor — Andy Beshear — supported boys competing in girls’ wrestling competitions, when in fact Beshear supported policies barring discrimination based on kids’ gender identity.
Schilling said it was “the left’s insistence that we need to start trans’ing kids” that made the issue a political one. But his group’s strategy in Kentucky helped wake conservatives up to the political value of highlighting it.
“We’re really just tapping into a real vulnerability that Democrats started for themselves,” Schilling said.
Trump had pursued various anti-transgender policies during his first term, including a ban on transgender service members. But during his campaign for reelection, he centered transgender issues like never before, dumping millions of dollars into anti-transgender ads that cast his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as an extreme progressive on such issues.
“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” one ad said.
Once in office, Trump moved even more aggressively against transgender rights than the community had feared — prompting various lawsuits from LGBTQ+ organizations that are still pending.
He issued an executive order declaring there are only two genders, and suggesting transgender people don’t actually exist. He again banned transgender people from serving in the military. He threatened the funding of states such as California with trans-inclusive school policies. He ordered transgender athletes out of youth sports. He said federal law enforcement would target those who provide gender-affirming care to minors. And his administration said it would stop providing transgender people with passports reflecting their identities.
President Trump signs an executive order in February banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.
(Jabin Botsford / Washington Post via Getty Images)
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the American people “voted for a return to common sense,” and Trump was “delivering on every campaign promise.”
“President Trump’s historic reelection and the overall MAGA movement is a big tent welcome for all and home to a large swath of the American people,” Fields said.
From offense to defense
Reggie Greer, who served as a senior advisor on LGBTQI+ Persons at the State Department in the Biden administration, remembers being in North Carolina during the 2016 bathroom bill fight. While local Democrats were pleased with how it had backfired on Republicans, it was clear to him that “hate is lucrative,” Greer said — with the anti-rights groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
He now sees the episode as an early warning of what was to come.
Nick Hutchins handled public affairs around the Obergefell case before joining the Human Rights Campaign, where he worked on state affairs and communications. Traveling through conservative states, he watched as more Republicans began seizing on LGBTQ+ issues after Trump’s 2016 victory.
“It was a moment when Republicans saw an opening and wanted to chip away at LGBTQ rights in any way they could,” Hutchins said. “That’s where you began to see a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach from their end, pursuing the bathroom bills that evolved into various education-focused bills, and healthcare.”
Inside the HRC during Trump’s first term, leadership felt confident that public opinion remained on their side. LGBTQ+ rights organizations had secured victories in statehouses on bathroom and healthcare issues, and were buoyed by Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020.
Yet, several warning signs emerged. Internal state polling by the HRC found large majorities of Americans supported trans rights, but a plurality opposed allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports.
One former HRC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the organization had not paid much attention to the issue until a series of political attacks in conservative states. The governor’s race in Kentucky was one, followed by a statehouse push in Louisiana.
Still, other battles — including “confronting whiteness in the movement” — took precedent, the former staffer recalled.
“There were significant generational divides within the organization between the older teams and their younger staff that were more diverse on these issues,” the staffer said. “It was a distraction.”
Hutchins said LGBTQ+ organizations today are having “autopsy conversations” to take stock of how things have played out in recent years and identify lessons to be learned.
Leaders look ahead
Among the most prominent leaders of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, there is consensus on many things.
It’s a scary time for LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups, including immigrants and women. Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. The LGBTQ+ rights movement needs more resources to continue fighting back. Nobody is going to throw transgender people under the bus just because some Democrats have suggested it would help them rebound politically.
“No one person, no one community, is expendable. End of story,” said Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the marriage case.
The actor Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender women in the country, said the marriage victory in 2015 left the right in need of “a new boogeyman,” and they picked transgender people — a tiny portion of the U.S. population, at around 1%.
They further picked on transgender people in sports — an even tinier group — in order to focus the conversation on “hormones and physical ability,” which is “a great way to objectify trans people, to reduce us to our bodies, and thus dehumanize us,” Cox said.
The best way to fight back, she said, is to refocus the conversation on transgender people’s humanity by allowing them to tell their own stories — rather than allowing their narratives to be “hijacked by propaganda.”
The actor Laverne Cox, shown in April, said trans people should be able to tell their own stories.
(Andy Kropa / Invision / Associated Press)
“We’re just like everybody else in terms of what we want, need, desire, our hopes and fears,” she said. “Living authentically and being able to be oneself is where the focus should be.”
Evan Wolfson, an attorney and founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, which is widely credited with securing the 2015 victory in the Obergefell case, said there are “three significant factors” that got the country to where it is today on transgender issues.
The “most important factor by far,” he said, “is the right-wing attack machine and the political agenda of some who are trying to attack and scapegoat and divide” the country around transgender issues.
A second factor, he said, is that transgender identities are still a “relatively new” concept for many Americans, and “that conversation is just not as far along as the very long conversation about who gay people are.”
A third and far less significant factor, he said, are the “missteps” by LGBTQ+ advocates in the last decade, including some vocally renouncing anyone who is not 100% supportive of trans rights.
“We worked hard in the Freedom to Marry campaign to bring people along and to distinguish between those who were our true opponents, those who were really anti-gay, anti-rights, anti-inclusion on the one hand, and those who I called the ‘reachable but not yet reached’ — people who weren’t with us, but weren’t our true opponents, people who were still wrestling with the question,” Wolfson said.
Allowing people a bit more time and space to be brought along on transgender issues will be necessary moving forward, he said — though he stressed that does not mean that advocates should slow down or pull back.
Wolfson rejected the idea that the LGBTQ+ community is moving too fast on transgender rights, which was also argued about marriage, and the idea that transgender rights should be abandoned as a political liability. “There is no reason to believe that we would profit from selling out our principles and doing the wrong thing just to avoid this tough moment,” Wolfson said.
Strangio said the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that zooming out, “there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about basic constitutional principles and civil rights protections” for all sorts of vulnerable people under the Trump administration.
Still, he said, he believes in the queer community’s “ability to move through setbacks” and come out on ahead of the “billion-dollar global campaigns to undermine equality protections” that began after the Obergefell decision.
“Fighting back was the right course,” he said, “and continuing to assess how we can effectively build support for the entire community is going to be a critical part of this next decade.”
