Trump and the far right are turning back the clock on LGBTQ rights. Last Pride month, the Supreme Court celebrated with a 6-3 decision on US v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors. Then this March, a federal court ruled that states can ban Medicaid from covering this life-saving care for trans adults as well, a horrifying extension of the precedent set by Skrmetti. Legislators have considered hundreds of anti-trans bills every year for the past three years. This year is on track to continue that trend, which started under Biden.

It’s not a coincidence Trump and the right wing are spending so much energy attacking trans people, who make up less than 1% of the population. Trump has no solutions for the cost-of-living or unemployment crises, and his war in Iran is pushing inflation higher and threatening a global recession. Their scapegoats at home are among the most marginalized, vulnerable, and easy to terrorize: trans people and immigrants.

The right-wing offensive against trans rights is also rooted in the drive toward imperialist war worldwide, and especially in the US. To prime society for war, ruling classes have ramped up an offensive of reactionary ideas, including around gender norms, to force conformity and submission. Attacks on trans rights are international, from the ban on LGBTQ events in Hungary (see pg. 13) to anti-homosexuality laws in Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya.

But these attacks aren’t inevitable, and they can be fought with working-class struggle. This Pride month, we can’t sit back as the far right strips away our rights. It can look like an uphill battle, but we can build this fightback, guided by the historic movements that won gains for queer people as well as the working-class movement for immigrant rights today.

One Year Of Trump

Trump wants to erase trans people from public life and force queer people back into the closet. On his first day in office, Trump signed a dystopian executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which defines “sex” in federal law to be biological sex assigned at birth. The wave of bans on trans kids in sports are an attack on young peoples’ ability to express themselves in public and removes trans kids from a space to socialize.

Trump-endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been on the warpath against gender-affirming care for trans youth for the last five years. Just a few weeks ago, Texas Children’s hospital agreed to pay $10 million to the state for allegations of falsely charging Medicaid for gender-affirming care procedures. The hospital will now be forced to set up the first “detransition clinic,” which Socialist Alternative in Houston has been campaigning against.

When these attacks first ramped up in 2023, trans youth led student walkouts across the country, including ones that Socialist Alternative helped organize. These walkouts were an important display of the anger among young people, but they did not broaden out to the mass movement needed. Today, given the level of the onslaught from the right wing, there is virtually no fightback, with many trans people understandably scared to protest the attacks. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has all but abandoned standing for queer rights. 

The war on trans people is not about “defending women” or “protecting kids.” In part, the right is using these attacks to gut social services that impact all working people, like when the White House blamed the halting of SNAP benefits on the Democrats’ support for “gender mutilation.”

The onslaught is one part of a full-spectrum, all-out attack on the gains of mass movements going back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. The overthrow of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was the opening salvo, and it has accelerated under Trump with the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the dismantling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and more.

Why has this been necessary? For one, the ruling class was shaken by powerful mass movements of the last decade, like the worldwide women’s movement, the George Floyd Rebellion, and the global wave of revolts around the turn of the 2020s. These movements were defeated—either crushed or not strong enough to win—but they showed mass disillusionment in the capitalist system. The ruling class was not satisfied with these defeats—they want to fully extinguish the embers of struggle, and they’re attempting to do this by rolling back major victories that our movements have won, going back decades.

Building A Society Fit For War

Repressive gender norms have long been a pillar of capitalism. The nuclear family, for example, is used to squeeze more free labor out of workers with the idea that women should cook and clean at home for free. Throughout history, gender roles have been shaped by the ruling class to fit its economic and political needs. But they’ve also been shaped by class struggle and social movements, like the gay liberation movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which, along with the women’s movement, fought for liberation against oppressive gender and family norms. A key driving force behind the reassertion of traditional gender roles today, including the crushing of trans rights, is the drive toward imperialist war that relies on conformity to keep workers in line.

The ruling class is gearing up for war all over the world, with the defining inter-imperialist conflict being between the US and China. The ideological groundwork for war has always included sexism: men need to be prepared to defend their country abroad, and women need to hold down the fort at home. Deviations from the norm point away from the nationalist and subservient working class that they want. Today, the attacks on trans rights are an expression of this trend.

The Trump administration even made sure to shoehorn trans people into its counterterrorism strategy, pledging the neutralization of groups “whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Trans people are being painted as an “enemy within,” antithetical to the “American way of life.”

Transphobia and queerphobia, racism, and sexism—none of these are inherent. No one is born hating trans people, but people are conditioned by the ideas of the ruling class, which needs a scapegoat for their system and to keep working people divided. The ruling class constantly injects these ideas into society, through reactionary legislation, the spewing of hatred from their puppets in office, and many other means. The crises of their own system, like low wages and the rising cost of living, create the conditions for divisions and reactionary beliefs to take root among the working class. We need to combat these ideas, wherever they arise, with class solidarity.

The Democrats Won’t Save Us

But this is not something the billionaire-backed Democratic Party can be counted on to do. During the 2024 election, Trump attacked Kamala Harris using an infamous ad stating “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Instead of unapologetically fighting for trans rights, Kamala and the establishment backed down in the face of these ads. After her massive loss, one of the DNC’s main conclusions was that the Democrats were “too woke” and needed to downplay issues of oppression, especially of trans people. 

This year, Democrats will try to funnel all energy and fear into the midterms to get them elected as a means to stop Trump. While they pose as the better option simply because they’re not Trump, the Democrats have in fact pushed the needle further to the right. 

After running on a promise to codify abortion rights into law, the Democrats did nothing but stand by when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, with Biden as president and both houses of Congress under Democratic control (see box). This betrayal is one of the most poignant, but is characteristic of the Democrats’ approach—run on promises that turn out to be empty once in office.

We need a new party independent of the Democrats and Republicans, based on the power of movements. It must fight unapologetically for a working-class program against all forms of oppression with rent control, healthcare for all, and a $25/hour minimum wage.

Pride Should Be A Protest

It can seem like an insurmountable challenge to push back the right wing when their attacks have so much momentum, but we need to rebuild the fight that Pride month was founded on in the first place. The massive struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s won many gains for queer people today, through tactics like occupations and mass protests, but Democrats and the corporations they serve have done everything they can to water down that radical legacy. The ruling class wants to take the teeth out of our movement and funnel it into safe, often profitable channels, like Pride parades dominated by corporate sponsors.

A key victory of the gay liberation movement was the very right to exist in public spaces. This meant fighting against laws criminalizing homosexuality either overtly, or through indirect laws like bans on “loitering” that were disproportionately enforced against LGBTQ people. Now Trump and the far right are trying to rip away the right for trans and queer people to exist in public. We can’t abandon the fight for unapologetic visibility, but we need to go further than “existence is resistance” too and connect this struggle to economic justice with a working-class program that fights for the common interests of our class and against all oppression. This makes it all the more important to return to fighting tactics and make Pride a protest independent of corporate interests.

Fighting for housing for all and rent control would disproportionately impact trans youth, who face homelessness at much higher rates, but would also be massively beneficial for all working-class people facing increasingly unaffordable housing. Free, universal healthcare with gender-affirming and reproductive care would be life changing for the tens of millions who are uninsured.

Same Struggle, Same Fight

Iconic trans activist Marsha P. Johnson said, “No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us,” articulating the interconnectedness of our struggles as working-class people. The fight for LGBTQ liberation is connected to the fight against ICE and the rest of Trump’s reactionary agenda. Young people today see this most clearly, with many young trans and queer people playing leading roles in anti-ICE student walkouts we saw earlier this year. 

The whipping up of attacks on immigrants is part of the same divide-and-rule strategy, and the best fightback is a united working-class struggle against all oppression. Our movement’s biggest blow so far to this reactionary agenda was the Battle of Minneapolis—when tens of thousands of workers in the Twin Cities went on strike against ICE in January. ICE was forced to draw down its operation in Minnesota and implemented a “course correction” in its strategy nationally. It wasn’t just immigrants who went on strike—it was a multiracial movement against the billions being funneled into ICE for them to murder our neighbors, while our schools and public services are gutted and falling apart.

The labor movement more broadly cannot be agnostic on issues of oppression and needs to take up their historic maxim: “An injury to one is an injury to all.” It’s important that some unions have taken a stronger stance on immigration, like SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis, which called for strike action after some of their immigrant members were abducted. Unions in healthcare, like National Nurses United, should connect the fight for better working conditions to the demand for universal healthcare, including gender-affirming care. Allowing these attacks on trans people to go unanswered, though, leaves the door open for more attacks on the working class. When working people are divided, it weakens our unions and the broader working class.

Pride was founded because of the massive occupations, protests, and direct actions of the gay liberation movement. They fought against workplace discrimination and police violence, which especially targeted queer people of color. We need a new party, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, based in these movements, which fights for the entire working class.

Ultimately, our movement needs to go further and take on the whole capitalist system. Capitalism will always need scapegoats for its crises and will always depend on dividing working people. We need to fight for an egalitarian socialist world, where working-class people democratically run the economy and our communities—a socialist world based on the common needs of all of us rather than climate destruction, far-right attacks, and war.

The Democrats Oversaw The Overturn Of Abortion Rights

The Democrats have not been winning any favors with young people. A Harvard Youth Poll conducted last year showed that 66% of young Americans disapproved of congressional Democrats’ job performances. And yet the Democrats, like a conniving ex, will beg us to give them one more chance.

Young people will understandably feel pressured to support Democrats in the midterms to slow down the barrage of Trump’s attacks. But recent history shows us that the Democrats don’t slow Trump down—they create the conditions for the right to grow back even stronger. We need to look no further than when, despite the Democrats controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress, the federally protected right to an abortion was overturned with virtually no fightback.

The tragic overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 did not come without warning. One year prior, Texas had enacted a “heartbeat bill”—a no-exceptions, six-week abortion ban. While Socialist Alternative raised the alarm bells for nearly a year, the Democrats did nothing to fight the predictable and preventable overturn of Roe, nor did they try to pass comprehensive federal legislation protecting the right to abortion in its place, or even mobilize a single protest. Worse still, they used the loss to campaign for the midterms on the promise to “protect abortion rights.” It was a slap in the face to working women everywhere. Four years later, they’ve cynically dropped any mention of abortion rights or protecting trans people as they campaign for the 2026 midterms.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade emboldened the right wing and flung open the door for attacks on women and queer people. Following this historic loss, a flood of anti-trans bills, abortion bounty laws, and healthcare funding cuts has left us drowning. So in our fight for women’s and queer liberation, we need to remember that the Democrats are not our protectors, but the right wing’s enablers. We need a revival of the mass movements, independent of both corporate parties, that won our rights in the first place.