From ICE jails to public libraries to Instagram, queer and trans people battled fascism on every front this year. This year — 2025 — was bleak. There’s trans joy around, but to keep it from drying up we’re going to need to stay with the horror of our current moment. Not so long that it destroys us, but long enough to strategize against its creeping totality. The right-wing descent that took place during this long year was predicted by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the Stonewall riot veteran and mentor to us both who passed this year. Queer and trans people like Major who were alive during the 1980s remember the early days of the AIDS epidemic and the reign of Reagan as a similarly bleak time, in jarring contrast to the revolutionary 1960s and ’70s. Major kept pushing during that period, behind the wheel of San Francisco’s first needle exchange van, and with a group of trans people dubbed Angels of Care who treated people dying from the virus (at the time, many established doctors and nurses refused). Groups like Angels of Care and the direct action-focused AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) provided where the state and traditional institutions would not. Following this lineage, queer and trans people in 2025 organized against the fascist takeover of the federal government. Indeed, despite the ascendant right wing, in 2025 queer and trans people in the U.S. organized on battlegrounds such as ICE jails, public libraries facing book bans, and on Instagram. Below are some of the grounds where we fought. A Struggle Over the Stonewall National Monument Miss Major was one of the people who fought the cops at the famous 1969 anti-police uprising outside the Stonewall Inn in New York City. The space was commemorated as the country’s first LGBT national monument under the Obama administration, but this year Donald Trump’s White House removed the words “queer” and “transgender” and later, references to bisexuals, from the monument’s signage and website, with the National Park Service instituting a new policy that only allows traditional rainbow flags. Rather than demanding that we simply return to the domestication that the initial monument offered, what if we demanded a commemoration as insurgent at the uprising itself? As Major noted, a commemorative plaque was nice, but free housing and free healthcare for trans people would be much more meaningful. Acting autonomously, people have replaced the flags on and off, regardless of the official policy.
via truthout: Queer and Trans People Were Under Attack in 2025. Here’s How We Fought Back
