Once gaining momentum at breakneck speed on the cultural front, the transgender movement — and the LGBT cause by extension — appears to have lost traction.
This year’s Pride Month, big-box retailers such as Target, which faced consumer backlash for its “tuck-friendly” swimsuits in 2023, noticeably scaled back their LGBT showcases. Instead of setting up front-and-center promotional displays, some chains have placed their Pride collections elsewhere, made them seemingly hidden and hard to find, or offered them only in select stores.
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According to a survey of over 200 corporate executives, 39% reported plans to reduce Pride-related engagements in 2025, including sponsoring such events, selling merchandise, and posting social media messages signaling support for LGBT rights.
Roughly six in 10 companies suggested to Gravity Research, a risk management firm, that they fear reprisal from the Trump administration, citing political pressure as the top reason for their recalibration. Moreover, the Pride Pulse Poll found that 65% of respondents were actively preparing for pushback, crafting reactive communication strategies, as they navigate a rapidly shifting stakeholder landscape.
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Many household brands, meanwhile, have abandoned participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s workplace inclusion scorecard, known as the Corporate Equality Index, which rates company policies, practices, and benefits for LGBT employees. Last year, Harley-Davidson, Ford Motors, and Lowe’s were among the businesses that announced they were ditching the initiative after decades of top ratings.
While much of the cultural recoil against the LGBT community at large can be attributed to a change in presidential administrations, moderates in the transgender movement, specifically, say abrasive messaging, a craze for social media clicks, and hard-line demands from far-Left fringes have hurt the cause.
Public perception
Jo Ellis, cohost of the TransNormal Podcast, a centrist-minded talk show featuring in-depth discussions about transgender matters, said larger-than-life social media celebrities such as Dylan Mulvaney and Lilly Tino, a transgender TikTok personality who rates women’s bathrooms at Walt Disney World, damage the public’s perception of transgender people.
“Most people don’t know a trans person, so when the only examples are extreme, they tend to think all trans people are like that,” Ellis said. “I’ve been told by many people that I’m nothing like what they thought trans people were like.”
Ellis hails from a conservative, homeschooled upbringing in the red South, with parents who voted for President Donald Trump each time. Ellis’s own voting record, too, was consistently Republican up until Trump. Ellis, a recently transitioned Iraq combat veteran and military pilot, has emerged as a vocal opponent of Trump’s ban on transgender servicemembers.
“They were against trans in the military because they thought it was people like Dylan Mulvaney or drag queens they’ve seen,” Ellis told the Washington Examiner. “There are many what I call ‘everyday’ trans people who are integrated, living their lives, working their jobs, and not trying to make ‘trans’ their identity.”
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Ellis emphasized the importance of elevating these “everyday” examples in the public eye, while noting, “It’s just difficult to appeal to social media when you are not selling rage bait and you have a life and a job outside of posting nuanced common-sense ideas.”
Transgender politico Brianna Wu, who has voiced discontent with the direction of transgender culture in the country, said Mulvaney is “the sexist equivalent of a 1920s minstrel show for the TikTok generation,” further calling the caricatured content “degrading and insulting.”
“That’s why trans politics feels so tone deaf today. [Transgender women] literally have not spent enough time with actual women to be socialized into the behavior and mindset,” Wu said. “How can you understand how offensive terms like pregnant person are if you’ve never had a platonic girlfriend?”
Dr. Laura Targownik, a Canadian gastroenterologist and academic with a background in public health policy, said an over-the-top style of activism can be seen as counter-productive if the ultimate goal of pro-transgender protests is to increase popular support.
“Highly provocative forms of protest are effective if the goal is to increase awareness, but I don’t believe that trans people in 2025 are suffering from a lack of awareness in the public eye,” Targownik, who cohosts the biweekly TransNormal Podcast with Ellis, told the Washington Examiner.
However, if the objective is to achieve acceptance, Targownik advised focusing on what transgender people have in common with the average citizen rather than what sets them apart to establish common ground.
Targownik explained that the challenge in this space is that the more disruptive and outrageous a behavior is, the more likely it is to find an audience. She elaborated that the more a viewpoint is likely to incite anger, the more it will attract the attention of opposing forces.
“Dylan Mulvaney’s exaggerated performance of womanhood (whether genuine to her personality or not) is going to draw more clicks and shares than Dylan Mulvaney would if she were wearing a cable knit sweater sitting in her den discussing contemporary trans issues,” Targownik said.
Though Targownik said she recognizes “the absolute right of Dylan Mulvaney to be Dylan Mulvaney,” she urged this loud subset of the community to “at least recognize the effect of the impact of the waves they are making when splashing about.”
LGB without the T?
In a recent New York Times interview, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first openly transgender member of Congress, hinted at the way transgender advocacy has inadvertently brought about a regression in public opinion around same-sex marriage.
According to a late May Gallup poll, GOP support for same-sex marriage recently reached a record low of 41%, an abysmal drop not seen since 2016, one year after the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision that guaranteed gay couples the right to marry.
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“There was a sense of cultural momentum that was this unending, cresting wave,” McBride said of LGBT activism in post-Obergefell America. “There is this sense of a cultural victory that lulled us into a false sense of security and in many ways shut down needed conversations.”
The transgender coalition then overplayed its hand, McBride reflected, making more maximalist, “probably premature” demands regardless of whether the public was ready.
Ellis said an all-or-nothing approach isn’t practical for driving meaningful change. “Sadly, social media algorithms encourage this approach because it’s extreme and drives rage and eyeballs.”
An absolutist, uncompromising approach, Ellis indicated, is part of the reason why the transgender lobby lost U.S. v. Skrmetti, a consequential Supreme Court case that upheld a Tennessee ban on pediatric sex-change procedures. The argument for underage gender-affirming care should have been about implementing guardrails to address concerns as opposed to fighting an outright ban, she said.
Moreover, the medical data backing the efficacy of these transgender treatments was weak, Ellis said. Instead of admitting the data was low-quality, radical transgender activists ignored negative outcomes for fear that casting doubt would lead to a ban or age requirements.
Trans-exclusionary LGB activists and detransitioners, people who took steps to transition their gender and later reversed the process, have accused the transgender movement of trying to “trans away the gay” by pathologizing gender-confused youth who would have otherwise grown up gay, absent medical intervention.
On whether the transgender movement still has a home underneath the Pride umbrella or should be a stand-alone offshoot, Ellis said transgender activists can be close allies with gay rights advocates, as there are areas of overlap, but that transgender rights and gay rights should not be shoehorned under the same banner.
Some state statutes treat sexual orientation and gender identity as equally protected classes or even merge the two under local civil rights law. Consolidating these cohorts under the same swath of protections has incensed some LGB trans-exclusionaries, who say they have been wrongly categorized together.
“I think the divide can heal now that there is starting to be a realization that mistakes were made with radical trans rights activism,” Ellis said. “I think it will emerge as something new. Aligned where it makes sense and not aligned where it doesn’t.”
Historically, transgender activism existing beneath the broader Pride umbrella proved advantageous, especially once marriage equality was won, Ellis said. “This paved a way for trans rights to make significant ground because it had the hearts and minds of those who supported gay marriage.”
But transgender rights should have been considered differently because gay rights center on sexual orientation, not gender dysphoria or identity, Ellis explained. Radical activists turned transgender identity into an umbrella term anyone can claim, regardless of a gender dysphoria diagnosis.
“This is what led it to being a social display instead of a medical treatment,” Ellis said. “The problem with this approach is it leads to people claiming trans identity on a whim for clout or advantage or worse — predatory reasons.”
Wu said when she transitioned 20 years ago, the transgender movement was making a distinctly different argument to the public. “The message was simple: I have a medical condition, and it is certified by clinicians,” she said. “I didn’t ask anyone to believe I was literally a woman. I only asked them to accept that I had the right to control my own body.”
Today, the transgender movement’s tactics and definitions have changed dramatically, Wu explained. “The dominant message now insists that trans women are literally women. And the scope of who is considered ‘trans’ has expanded far beyond what we once understood.”
According to Wu, its breadth includes “fetishistic cross-dressers,” who previously would not have been accepted as part of the transgender population at all; teenage girls struggling with trauma and body acceptance, who are aggressively marketed testosterone as a cure-all; and non-binary identities, “often just a catch-all label for ordinary gender non-conformity.”
Wu, however, said she sees no tension between gay people and “old school, traditional transsexuals.”
“It’s this new political project they object to,” Wu said, referring to self-declared LGBT identities. “People know actual transsexuals when they see them.”
Targownik said the gay community is quite diverse, and outside of “the Thunderdome of social media,” many LGB people are still trans-supportive. That said, she urged some separation within the transgender community between “binary integrationists,” or those who want to pursue fulfillment and assimilation in their perceived gender role, from transgender activists trying to transcend traditional gender norms or disrupt the gender binary entirely.
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“Unfortunately, we binary integrationists, busy with the day-to-day responsibilities of living our lives and generally not seeking the public eye, abdicated the defense of these rights to visible activists whose priorities were not in alignment with ours, and whose messaging and delivery was unrelatable and sometimes offensive to the general public,” Targownik said.
Wu said her generation has left the transgender movement in the hands of children. “I think it’s time for reasonable transsexual adults to step up and lead our movement,” she said, fearing there is no future for the transgender community if the movement fails to change course.