Will gay rights be taken away
Trump on LGBTQ Rights
Conclusion
Across the country in recent years, gender nonconforming people and their families have been targeted by a relentless assault on their rights, their safety, and their fundamental freedom to be themselves. States have adopted laws criminalizing their health care, attempting to ban them from public life, and even threatening to remove transgender youth from families that love and affirm them. Throughout this political onslaught, the ACLU, our nationwide affiliate network, and our millions of members have remained stalwart in defense of the basic principle that all people deserve the freedom to be themselves and every state should be a safe place to raise every family.
Donald Trump’s promises to take these discriminatory policies nationwide should be unthinkable, but it is nonetheless a future we’re prepared for. Transgender people are no strangers to government persecution, political slander, or the criminalization of gender nonconformity. They recognize how to assemble safety, community, and care among one another, and the ACLU has a century-long history of representing, supporting, and advocating for the powerless, the silenced, the m
What’s the context?
Pending laws, court cases and policy decisions in several countries will protect some LGBTQ+ individuals and restrict others
LONDON - After a year that saw both major gains and a spate of setbacks for rights, 2025 is set to be another mixed year for LGBTQ+ people, with some countries achieving marriage equality and others criminalising diverse sexualities and genders.
Last year progress was made through marriage equality in Greece and Thailand, the decriminalisation of lgbtq+ sex in Namibia and Dominica and self-identification laws in Germany and Ecuador, which ease the process of changing legal gender.
However, other countries experienced considerable setbacks, with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation passing in Ghana, Mali, Georgia and Bulgaria.
A grim threshold was crossed in 2024, when the number of trans and gender-diverse people who have been murdered surpassed 5,000 for the first time since a rights group began following such cases in 2008.
In the United States, more than 570 bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community were tracked by rights groups.
Here are the key things to look out for in 2025.
Liechtenstein's
Project 2025 Exposed
Strip away non-discrimination policies
– Removing terms including “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “abortion,” and “reproductive rights” from federal rules, regulations, contracts, grants, and legislation.
– Restricting the application of the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which extended workplace protections against sex discrimination to LGBTQ employees.
– Rescinding regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender self, transgender status, and sex characteristics.
– Defining “sex discrimination” narrowly as referring only to the “biological binary” of male and female as assigned at birth.
Restrict health care
– Eliminating transgender health care in Medicare and Medicaid
– Opposing transgender health care or abortion access to service members using public funds
– End anti-discrimination rules based on gender identity and sexual orientation in the Affordable Protect Act
– Ending Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices which would negatively impact millions of elderly Americans, particula
Some Republican lawmakers grow calls against homosexual marriage SCOTUS ruling
Conservative legislators are increasingly speaking out against the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision on same-sex marriage equality.
Idaho legislators began the trend in January when the state House and Senate passed a resolution calling on the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision -- which the court cannot do unless presented with a case on the issue. Some Republican lawmakers in at least four other states like Michigan, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota own followed suit with calls to the Supreme Court.
In North Dakota, the resolution passed the mention House with a vote of 52-40 and is headed to the Senate. In South Dakota, the state’s Dwelling Judiciary Committee sent the proposal on the 41st Legislative Day –deferring the bill to the final day of a legislative session, when it will no longer be considered, and effectively killing the bill.
In Montana and Michigan, the bills hold yet to encounter legislative scrutiny.
Resolutions acquire no legal leadership and are not binding law, but instead allow legislative bodies to state their collective opinions.
The resolutions in four other states ech
A decade after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, marriage equality endures risky terrain
Milestones — especially in decades — usually call for celebration. The 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, is distinct. There’s a sense of unease as state and federal lawmakers, as good as several judges, grab steps that could carry the issue back to the Supreme Court, which could undermine or overturn existing and future gay marriages and weaken additional anti-discrimination protections.
In its nearly quarter century of reality, the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Regulation has been on the front lines of LGBTQ rights. Its amicus concise in the Obergefell case was instrumental, with Justice Anthony Kennedy citing statistics from the institute on the number of homosexual couples raising children as a deciding factor in the landmark decision.
“There were claims that allowing queer couples to marry would somehow devalue or diminish marriage for everyone, including different-sex couples,” said Brad Sears, a distinguished senior scholar of law and policy at the Williams Institute. &