If we’re being honest, looking back on the 2025 LGBTQ+ year in review, it’s clear that the last 12 months weren’t just ‘challenging’ for the queer community; it was a veritable sh*t storm of problems and pain, especially for our trans brothers and sisters.
From the moment Trump placed his tiny hand on the Bible and promised to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution (how’s that working out?), it seems as though the federal government has spent the last 12 months working overtime to erase our existence and delete our progress. Not everything was bleak, though. There were moments that felt like relief, offered some hope and gave us a little distraction.
With that as the backdrop, here’s a look back at the stories that helped shape queer life in 2025.
First Light: McBride Makes History
The year actually began with a flicker of defiance. On January 3, Sarah McBride was sworn in as Delaware’s sole representative, making her the first openly transgender person to serve in the U.S. Congress. Despite the immediate, obsessive vitriol from colleagues like Nancy Mace—who spent her first weeks trying to ban McBride from Capitol bathrooms, Sarah stayed focused. She became the first freshman Democrat of the 119th Congress to introduce a bill (the bipartisan Ending Scam Credit Repair Act), proving she was there to work while others were there to perform.
Day One: The “Biological Truth” Era
Trans lives were upended again the second the clock hit noon on January 20. Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism,” forced a binary worldview on every federal agency. By year’s end, the State Department had removed “X” markers from passports, forcing non-binary citizens to misidentify themselves just to travel.
The Quiet Purge: Deleting the Digital Self
While the headlines followed the rallies, a “Quiet Purge” was happening behind the scenes. Within days of the inauguration, federal agencies began scrubbing thousands of pages of LGBTQ+ data from the CDC, NIH, and Census Bureau. It wasn’t just terminology changes—like replacing “LGBTQ” with “LGB”—it was the deletion of life-saving research. The most heartless move came in July, when the administration terminated the 988 Suicide Lifeline’s specialized LGBTQ+ youth services. By removing the “Press 3” option, they cut a literal lifeline for over 1.5 million kids in crisis. While the federal government walked away, locally, California stepped up to fill the gap, proving that our state remains a sanctuary.
The Great Erasure: Stripping Milk and Stonewall
In February, the National Park Service delivered another blow by scrubbing “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument website while ultimately banning trans pride flags from the site altogether. It felt like a calculated erasure of the very people who helped start the queer revolution.
In June, the hits kept on coming. In a move of calculated pettiness, the Navy officially stripped Harvey Milk’s name from the USNS Harvey Milk which felt kinda personal as we kicked off 2025 WeHo Pride Season.
A Court Divided: Legal Blows, Healthcare Wins, and the Ghost of Obergefell
June was also the month the Court turned its back on us. On June 18, United States v. Skrmetti gave red states the green light to ban gender-affirming care for minors. A week later, Mahmoud v. Taylor allowed parents to opt kids out of inclusive stories, essentially trying to legislate us back into the closet. The same day, in a landmark 6-3 decision in the case Kennedy v. Braidwood, the Court upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This ruling ensures that most insurers must continue to cover preventive services—including PrEP, cancer screenings, and vaccines—at no cost to the patient. While the Court’s decision did not mention PrEP explicitly, the litigation was originally sparked by plaintiffs who argued that being required to cover the medication violated their religious principles. By reversing an earlier decision from the Fifth Circuit, the Supreme Court kept the ACA’s preventive care mandate intact.
And, in a satisfying twist of fate, ten years after Obergefell, Kim Davis finally lost her final appeal in November. The Court’s refusal to hear her case left her with a $100,000 bill and kept marriage equality intact for now. Hard to believe we’re living in the same country that codified marriage equality just 10 Junes ago.
The Military and the Playing Field
Remember the trans military ban? It’s back. In May, SCOTUS let the administration begin purging trans service members again while the lawyers fight it out. Thousands of people who were good enough to serve on Monday were a “distraction” by Tuesday. And then there was the NCAA. In February, they nuked trans participation. All this while NCAA President Charlie Baker admitted we’re talking about maybe ten athletes out of half a million. They’re rewriting the rulebook to “fix” a problem that represents 0.002% of student-athletes. Talk about a solution in search of a problem.
Money Talks, Corporations Walk
This was the year the “Pride Month” logos were ditched the moment things got tough. San Francisco Pride took a $300k hit. NYC Pride lost $750k. St. Louis? Anheuser-Busch, the people who started this corporate mess, bailed after decades of support. But look at the holdouts. Apple and Delta actually grew a pair. Their shareholders laughed off anti-DEI proposals, proving that some people still realize that excluding talent is just bad for business. And Target is a clear example of how ignorance can backfire; after scaling back DEI, executives later pointed to the rollback when warning about tanking 2025 sales.
Keeping the Faith: Gaga, Chappell, and Will Byers
Yet, all was not lost. If it wasn’t for pop culture, we’d have lost our freakin’ minds. Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM dropped on March 7, and it felt like a survival kit. In November, Wicked: For Good reminded us that being “wicked” is often just what they call you when you refuse to conform. Yes, watching Elphaba and Glinda navigate a crumbling world onscreen felt a little too familiar, but it also gave us a language for the resistance many are living offscreen.
Between the screens, Chappell Roan raised over $400,000 for trans youth, and the “Protect the Dolls” tees became the official uniform of the resistance. But the biggest television moment came on Christmas Day when the series Stranger Things finally saw its character Will Byers come out as gay. In a scene that faced massive review-bombing from the MAGA crowd, Will confessed his truth to his family and friends to reclaim his power from Vecna. It was the ultimate metaphor for 2025: our self-acceptance is our greatest weapon.
Final Verdict
2025 was the year the mask came off. We saw exactly which corporations value our business and which were just using us for a photo op. We saw a Supreme Court willing to trade our healthcare for political points. But we also saw Sarah McBride take her seat, we saw Kim Davis lose for the tenth year in a row, and we saw that even if they scrub the websites, they can’t scrub us out of existence.
If the Trump era part deux is about erasure, our job is to stay visible. Our existence is the resistance. And if there’s one thing we know in WeHo, it’s how to live loud and proud.
I wish tiny hands (and elsewhere) would RUN away. Period. I lived in NYC during his first entree in “society” (sorry). I knew it was a bad idea then…now it’s unspeakable!
A sh*t storm, indeed. It’s ongoing in 2026.
It reeked in the 70’s. Now it is sucking the oxygen out of the air we breathe.