Fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in 2025

By Michael Johnson

The pace of attacks can feel overwhelming. Donald Trump’s second term began in January with cruel attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in the US on a much bigger scale than in his first term. 

Just this month, the US Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that the federal government has proposed to cut all funding for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ+ youth specialised services. Despite only being signed into law during Trump’s first term, this programme has provided an estimated 1.3 million crisis contacts with LGBTQ+-inclusive services.

Trump’s attacks have led more people to seek such services. He signed multiple executive orders in his first three months in office that impact the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the US, from healthcare, to legal recognition, to protection from discrimination. In February, the BBC reported, for example, that “leading public health agencies appeared to have culled webpages that discussed gender, sexually transmitted diseases, and LGBT health” in the US.

While it was never true that LGBTQ+ liberation was an inevitability within the system of profit-before-all-else capitalism, the basis for that hope has suffered major blows in the last year.

The fight for LGBTQ+ rights in 2025 takes place against a backdrop of governments and right-populist politicians seeking to whip up division as a distraction from their inability to solve the cost-of-living crisis and the rest of the problems capitalist crisis means for the 99%, while the 1% get richer. LGBTQ+ workers and young people alongside migrants are among those at the sharp end.

Less than a year in, Keir Starmer’s Labour is embarking on further austerity cuts to day-to-day spending on services. And, like all governments attacking workers’ living standards in service to the capitalist bosses, Labour has shown that it cannot be relied on to defend the rights of oppressed sections of society.

April’s Supreme Court ruling on trans rights proves yet again that minority rights are not secure in a society in which a capitalist elite relies on scapegoating to preserve their rule. This is especially the case now when that rule is engulfed by crisis and its defenders are unable to build and maintain support bases. The local election results showed the alienation from Labour, who lost about 60% of the seats they had held before polling day on 1 May.

This Supreme Court ruling will do nothing to improve women’s safety or access to services. But the tiny trans population will face more challenges in terms of access to public services, toilets, and legal rights, and the dangers to trans rights and identities from an emboldening of those who oppose them. 

The 2021 census found that there were around 262,000 people, 0.5% of the population, who identified as having a gender different from their sex assigned at birth. The number of recorded hate crimes against transgender people rose by about 60% between 2021 and 2024.

The Supreme Court ruling was carried out by five judges from the capitalist establishment, all educated at Cambridge or Oxford. Sometimes judges can be used to take decisions that politicians are afraid to take for electoral reasons.

The Labour government has also sought to pass off its attacks on trans health provision as something required of it by a ‘greater’ power, in this instance by an academic review by Dr Hilary Cass. But the 388 pages of the review have no power to force governments to act. The government’s decisions are part of its broader approach of cutting public services and whipping up division.

The working class is far from uniform. We have different skin colours, religions, languages, sexualities, genders, ages, ethnicities, and more. But we have a shared experience of being exploited by the big business bosses in the capitalist class. 

Flowing from that is the potential to organise collectively and challenge the policies of the capitalist class – and to replace them and their system with a socialist alternative based on planning society to meet the needs of all. It is to prevent this that divisions among us are sought using everything the capitalist class has at their disposal including so-called culture wars.

But the ability of the capitalist class to whip up homophobia has been weakened – including by the resistance of LGBTQ+ workers and young people, and greater confidence to reject backward divisive ideas. 

However, the capitalist class has spent a decade investing in presenting the tiny population of trans women as a threat to women’s rights. They have the advantage that women’s safety and services are under threat – but from cuts and capitalism not trans women. The absence of a mass workers’ party to answer their lies is another major advantage to them. Unfortunately, some trade union leaders, even those who have been seen as on the left, have not countered these lies with a mass struggle to end austerity, oppose discrimination, and fight for all our rights.

Trans women are in the front line. But that does not mean that lesbian, gay and bisexual people, trans men and non-binary people are not also impacted – as well as the wider working class. 

Austerity attacks have led to a collapse of youth services generally, huge waiting lists for mental health care, widespread closures of public toilets, and more. A lack of decent affordable housing often forces LGBTQ+ people into unsafe situations or back into the closet with unsafe families or housemates, too.

Sexual health services have been described in the British Medical Journal as at “breaking point” following £1 billion in cuts over the last ten years. For context, this year the Sunday Times Rich List revealed that the five richest people in Britain alone own £128 billion. Labour’s policies, including Streeting’s moves to escalate privatisation, will only add to pressures already hitting the NHS and continue the transfer of wealth from the working class to the richest.

In the workplace

One in five LGBTQ+ people already report verbal abuse in the workplace and one in 20 have experienced physical violence or threats, according to research by the Trades Union Congress. All this means more than a quarter of LGBTQ+ people aren’t open with anyone at work. Just under half of respondents reported that they experienced bullying at work, rising to eight in ten for trans people.

Homophobic bullying remains a problem in schools. In November, research by a charity found that 78% of primary school children across the UK hear homophobic language. 

This situation was made worse by the threat of the Tories to introduce draft guidance on gender-questioning students in schools. They received pushback from the government’s lawyers as well as some education unions. Labour has not so far taken action to progress the draft, but neither have they acted to cut across its chilling effect, undermining school workers’ confidence that they can support gender-questioning students.

The Tory draft guidance for schools has been likened to Margaret Thatcher’s  Section 28, a reactionary and homophobic attempt to ban the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools, part of the Local Government Act 1988.

Education workers were anxious about falling foul of Thatcher’s law, many feeling unable to even mention that gay people existed or challenge homophobic bullying, let alone be ‘out’ at work. Such was the climate of fear, even after it was repealed in the sixth year of the Blair Labour government, many teachers were worried it was still in force.

However, it is worth remembering that although the Tories went all-in on anti-trans women attacks in their general election campaign, it didn’t save them from being smashed. There is huge anger in society at the consequences of Tory austerity, and its continuation by Starmer’s Labour and the potential for a mass fightback – but that requires the struggle to unite the working class.

The changed context of that struggle is something that fighters for LGBTQ+ rights need to recognise, discuss, and respond to.

For a whole period, capitalism and capitalist politicians have been compelled by changing social attitudes and the struggles of LGBTQ+ people, to outwardly appear to support our rights. This has led to investment into Pride events, corporations monetising and marketing their support by slapping rainbows on their logo during Pride month, for example. That ‘support’ was never reliable.

The cancellation of this year’s Liverpool Pride event is a stark example. Under pressure from LGBTQ+ workers and young people organisers cut ties with Barclays Bank but have struggled to secure funding from other sponsors. 

In the US, brands such as Amtrak, Anheuser-Busch, Benefit Cosmetics, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Citi, Comcast/Xfinity, Deloitte, Diageo, Garnier, Goldman Sachs, Lowe’s, Mastercard, Meta, Nissan, Pepsi, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Skyy Vodka, Target, Visa and Walmart have pulled back Pride sponsorships and donations this year.

But Pride never needed corporate sponsorship to be successful protests for LGBTQ+ rights. The retreat by these corporations is a response to the changed approach from the White House – but also the limited success their rainbow-washing had. In the US, only 16% of LGBTQ and 13% of non-LGBTQ adults believe companies are motivated by a “genuine desire to celebrate LGBTQ people.”

We need a fighting Pride

Pride events can play a key role in bringing people together to fight for what’s needed. They have their roots in the political campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights, identifying the major issues affecting us and challenging the establishment. While Pride events should of course celebrate the massive steps forward since Pride started, faced with culture war attacks and the crisis of capitalism we need a fighting Pride more than ever. This should include, rather than banning political parties, challenging those that would pass on these attacks like Labour and the Tories, making them face the community.

The decisions from some organisers of various Pride events to ban political parties from Pride events is in part an expression of disgust at all the establishment parties – but have not been made on the basis of democratic decisions and are not the answer. From some organisers tied to Labour and even the Tories, they are attempts to avoid the need to discuss how to fight for LGBTQ+ rights in 2025.

These attacks are happening now, not because people have suddenly stopped supporting LGBTQ+ rights, but as a reflection of the era of capitalist crisis we are living through.

Faced with this new situation, self-appointed leaders of the LGBTQ+ community, and organisations like Stonewall and others, are lost. Their strategy of relying on incremental legal improvements under capitalist governments is shattering.

Legal changes and steps forward to improve the lives of ordinary working people should be welcomed. But the Supreme Court’s decision, and the way it is being used by capitalist politicians and sections of the establishment, shows we can’t rely on the courts or other capitalist institutions to defend our rights.

It shows how reforms can be rolled back. What is needed is an organised working-class fightback. The working class has a proud history of both fighting for what is needed but also making unjust laws unworkable, such as with the mass non-payment of the Poll Tax, under the leadership of the Socialist Party (then Militant).

The fightback against Section 28 saw mass protests pulling together the LGBTQ+ community, trade unions and wider society. It directly challenged the homophobia of the state and media, including abseiling down the houses of parliament and invading news broadcasts!

But it was a failure of the trade union and Labour leaders at the time that there was not a greater link built between the struggle against Section 28 and the other sections of the Local Government Act of 1988 which introduced vicious privatisation.

The potential for that was shown in the trade union solidarity for these protests, in particular from the National Union of Miners (NUM). That stemmed from the LGBTQ+ community and trade unions recognising their shared battle against the hated Thatcher government, and in reciprocating the support shown to striking miners during the 1984 miners’ strike, as depicted in the movie Pride.

While this movement was not able to immediately defeat Section 28, partly due to being redirected into less militant campaigning by organisations like Stonewall, it was a major factor in changing attitudes towards homosexuality and laid the groundwork for its eventual repeal.

Critical in taking forward our current fight will be the trade unions. Bringing together over six million workers in workplaces, they have the power to make the Supreme Court ruling unworkable where it is used to divide in the workplaces. 

The trade unions can also play a key role in taking the fight further, by striking to challenge Labour austerity and fighting for the services and resources the working class needs. The trade union movement can be a space for workers to come together, to discuss and debate what is needed in terms of healthcare, housing, education and more, cutting across the toxicity of the culture wars. 

The trade unions are also key to building a party of our own! A new party of the working class would bring together LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, women and other campaigners. That would give us a voice and way to challenging the politics of austerity and division at the ballot box, offering a socialist alternative.

Socialist Party activists will take part in Prides this year, putting forward what is needed to defend the rights of LGBTQ+ people and all those facing oppression. That is building united mass working-class struggle for a socialist society, free from want and capitalist division which would enable us all to live freely.

If you want to help us fight for LGBTQ+ rights in 2025, and fight for a socialist world free from oppression – join us!