As a Black queer advocate and policy professional, I have never been naive about politics. But 2025 surpassed even cynics’ worst fears. The Trump-Vance administration didn’t just change laws; it dismantled protections, erased identities, stripped away care, and declared that some lives don’t matter.

Black and brown communities already battling racialized policing, economic precarity, and limited access to care suffered new blows on multiple fronts. For women, girls, transgender youth, disabled people, queer folks, immigrants, the message was clear: Not only your rights, but your bodies, your health, and your lives are expendable.

President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth” redefined gender as a binary fixed from birth. Across agencies, “gender” became “sex,” and gender identity was erased from federal recognition and protections.

Trump’s January 24 executive order reinstating Hyde Amendment-style restrictions cut virtually all federal funding for abortion, and clawed back health funding for reproductive services. The 1977 Hyde Amendment banned using federal funds for abortion (except in cases of rape or incest or a life-threatening pregnancy). Doubling down on it disproportionately impacts women, girls, low-income people, and communities of color.

Communities of color, LGBTQI people, women, girls, and transgender youth are not disappearing. We are organizing; we are resisting; we are making care, dignity, and justice real.

By mid-2025, all federal support for LGBTQI-specific crisis services through the national suicide prevention hotline 988 was suspended—a direct blow to people who rely on them when they have nowhere else to turn.

Over the course of the year, health-equity protections, data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity, nondiscrimination guidance, and federal support for queer and trans-inclusive care were all revoked.

Taken........

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