Pride Month Is Not for You, MAGA. It Is Because of You.
Pride Month did not emerge from comfort. It emerged from a documented legislative campaign, a measurable mental health crisis, and a vote of 217 to 198. The people who dismiss it cast all three
Who This Is For
The movement that calls Pride Month unnecessary introduced 510 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2023, 533 in 2024, and 616 by October 2025 (ACLU, 2025). The movement that calls it special treatment passed H.R. 2616 by a vote of 217 to 198, conditioning federal school funding on parental consent before a school can acknowledge a transgender student’s identity, with no exceptions for children in abusive homes. The movement that calls it shoved in their faces issued four executive orders targeting transgender Americans in the first weeks of the current administration.
The Trevor Project surveyed 16,667 LGBTQ young people between the ages of 13 and 24 in 2025 and found, for the seventh consecutive year, that LGBTQ youth are placed at heightened risk for suicidality not because of who they are but because of how they are mistreated (Trevor Project, 2026). Anti-LGBTQ victimization, policies, and rhetoric contributed meaningfully to rates of poor mental health and suicide risk. That finding has now replicated seven times in a row. The people celebrating Pride this month are not celebrating because the fight is over. They are celebrating because surviving a coordinated legislative and rhetorical campaign against your existence while the data accumulates around you is something worth marking.
Among Trump voters in the 2020 presidential election, conservatives were 2.6 times more likely than Trump voters with other political views to believe gay relationships are immoral, and 2.4 times more likely to oppose gay marriage, controlling for age, sex, and race (Eidelhoch, 2025). The groomer characterization of LGBTQ people as inherent child predators, which has become a standard feature of right-wing political rhetoric, has direct roots in the 1970s activism of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children coalition. It did not emerge from evidence. It emerged from the same ideological tradition that produced the Lavender Scare, the AIDS crisis silence, and the current legislative campaign. Pride Month exists as a direct consequence of an organized, documented political campaign against LGBTQ existence, and the people demanding it end are the people who made it necessary.
What They Call Protection
Protecting children is the label. Erasing transgender identity from federal existence is the act. The 2024 Republican platform explicitly stated opposition to left-wing gender insanity without endorsing equal rights for LGBTQ Americans in any form. By February 10, 2025, ten days into the new administration, the ACLU had already tracked 339 bills in the 2025 state legislative session alone.
The Trump administration issued an executive order on January 20, 2025, directing all federal agencies to remove statements, policies, regulations, forms, and communications promoting gender ideology and to end federal funding of it (Executive Order, 2025). GLAAD documented that federal agencies subsequently erased Stonewall National Monument’s LGBTQ history from official records. The administration’s own memoranda designated anti-fascism as domestic terrorism while listing hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality as a marker of violent conduct, meaning that opposing the administration’s position on LGBTQ identity is now framed as grounds for federal investigation. Bandura documented this mechanism precisely: reframing harm to a targeted group as the defense of a higher moral purpose converts suppression into public service and allows the person enforcing it to experience themselves as protecting rather than persecuting (Bandura, 1999).
H.R. 2616 passed 217 to 198. It conditions federal school funding on parental consent before a school can acknowledge a transgender student’s preferred name, pronouns, or gender markers. It contains no exceptions for children in unsafe homes, in foster care, or in abusive situations. The Trevor Project found that transgender youth with at least one accepting adult in their lives are 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide (Trevor Project, 2026). H.R. 2616 is designed to remove the institutional mechanism through which that accepting adult might reach a child whose home does not provide one. Among MAGA Republicans specifically, 69.9 percent scored in strong agreement on homonegativity, the highest prevalence of any measured prejudice in a nationally representative survey, with adjusted prevalence differences exceeding 50 percentage points compared to non-MAGA non-Republicans (Wintemute et al., 2025). The claim that this is about parental rights rather than the elimination of LGBTQ identity from institutional life requires ignoring both the bills and the data that produced them.
The Emboldening Effect: What the Rhetoric Produces
Rhetoric is not just words. Newman et al. documented in a controlled experimental study that in the absence of prejudiced elite speech, prejudiced citizens suppress the expression of their prejudice. In the presence of it, they are emboldened to both express and act upon it (Newman et al., 2021). Arnold et al. replicated this finding after the 2024 election, documenting that Trump’s negative rhetoric toward specific groups predicted an increase in the perceived acceptability of prejudice toward those groups and a rise in self-reported prejudice following the election (Arnold et al., 2026).
Charlesworth and Banaji tracked more than 7.1 million implicit and explicit attitude tests collected continuously between 2007 and 2020 and found that four implicit attitudes, including race and disability, showed temporary increases in bias concentrated among conservative respondents and respondents in Republican states during the period of Trump’s 2016 campaign and early presidency (Charlesworth and Banaji, 2022). The increases were not observed for attitudes toward groups Trump did not target. They occurred specifically for groups his rhetoric named.
The behavioral consequences follow the attitudinal ones. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes at schools more than doubled between the 2015 to 2019 period and 2021 to 2022, rising from an average of 108 incidents per year to 232. GLAAD tracked 918 anti-LGBTQ incidents in 2024 alone, including seven fatalities and 140 bomb threats (GLAAD, 2025). LGBT people are five times more likely than non-LGBT people to be victims of violent crime and nine times more likely to experience violent hate crimes, based on 2022 and 2023 National Crime Victimization Survey data (UCLA Williams Institute, 2025). FBI hate crime statistics confirmed that crimes motivated by sexual orientation and gender identity rose from 2022 to 2023 (FBI UCR, 2024). Among MAGA Republicans specifically, homonegativity was the most prevalent prejudice measured in a nationally representative survey, with 69.9 percent scoring in strong agreement, and homonegativity and transphobia produced statistically significant increases in support for and willingness to commit political violence (Wintemute et al., 2025).
The Body Count: What the Research Measures
LGBTQ people are not inherently prone to mental health challenges. Ilan Meyer established this in 2003 with a framework that has since been confirmed across decades of replication: stigma, prejudice, and discrimination create a hostile and stressful social environment that causes mental health problems in people who belong to stigmatized minority groups (Meyer, 2003). The elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality documented in LGBTQ populations are not a product of identity. They are a product of what is done to people because of it.
The Trevor Project surveyed 16,667 LGBTQ young people ages 13 to 24 in 2025 and found, for the seventh consecutive year, that anti-LGBTQ victimization, policies, and rhetoric contributed meaningfully to poor mental health and suicide risk (Trevor Project, 2026). Thomas analyzed 69,516 college students from the nationwide Healthy Minds Study between 2023 and 2024 and found that LGBTQ students in conservative states were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as those in liberal states, 2.6 times more likely to meet the threshold for severe depression, and significantly more likely to report daily feelings of dread (Thomas, 2025). Health Affairs Scholar found a statistically significant inverse relationship between protective state LGBTQ policy scores and poor self-rated health, poor mental health days, and poor physical health days using 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey data (Health Affairs Scholar, 2025). The Lancet Psychiatry documented an estimated 2.5 times increased risk of mental health problems including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidality among LGBTQ individuals compared to non-LGBTQ individuals (Lancet Psychiatry, 2025).
González-Fuentes et al. documented that all eight of Bandura’s moral disengagement mechanisms predict homophobic behavior, including moral justification, euphemistic language, distortion of consequences, and attribution of blame (González-Fuentes et al., 2022). The people producing the legislative record in Section II have a documented psychological architecture that prevents them from experiencing what they are doing as harmful. Protecting children is the moral justification. Parental rights is the euphemistic language. The distortion of consequences is the claim that none of this has a measurable effect on LGBTQ wellbeing. The attribution of blame is the argument that LGBTQ mental health challenges are caused by personal choices rather than by the conditions the data traces directly to political hostility. LGBTQ youth with at least one accepting adult in their lives are 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide (Trevor Project, 2026). That number exists because the alternative exists. The alternative passed 217 to 198.
The Groomer Narrative: What It Is and What It Does
The groomer characterization of LGBTQ people as inherent child predators is not a policy position that emerged from evidence. Eidelhoch documented its direct roots in the 1970s activism of Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children coalition, which used the identical rhetorical strategy of framing gay and lesbian people as threats to children to justify the removal of civil rights protections in Dade County, Florida in 1977 (Eidelhoch, 2025). The modern iteration is explicitly associated with the political right and with supporters of Donald Trump. A 2022 nationally representative survey found that 49 percent of Trump voters in the 2020 presidential election believed it was probably or definitely true that gay and lesbian public school teachers were trying to recruit children and prey on them sexually. That belief is not a conclusion drawn from reported incidents. It is a half-century-old narrative recycled through new platforms and given political legitimacy by elected officials who repeat it without evidence.
Charlesworth and Hatzenbuehler analyzed 100 years of English-language book text across 58 stigmatized groups and found that aggregate negative stereotypes toward stigmatized groups remain remarkably stable over time through two mechanisms: reproducibility, in which the same underlying negativity is reproduced toward a single target using updated vocabulary, and replacement, in which negativity transfers from one group to another (Charlesworth and Hatzenbuehler, 2024). The groomer narrative is reproducibility in its operational form. The vocabulary shifted from the Lavender Scare’s characterization of homosexuals as security threats and moral degenerates to the contemporary characterization of LGBTQ people as child predators, but the underlying negative valence and the political function it serves are identical.
Bandura’s moral justification mechanism explains why the narrative is so durable: reframing harm to LGBTQ people as protection of children converts suppression into public service and allows the person enforcing it to experience themselves as a defender rather than a persecutor (González-Fuentes et al., 2022). Once that reframing is in place, legislation becomes protective, executive orders become safety measures, and book removal becomes child welfare. Wintemute et al. documented that 26.6 percent of a nationally representative sample scored in strong agreement on homonegativity, the highest prevalence of any measured prejudice, and that homonegativity significantly increases support for and willingness to commit political violence (Wintemute et al., 2025).
H.R. 2616 contains no exceptions for children in abusive homes, in foster care, or in situations where parental notification poses a documented safety risk. The bill is designed to remove the institutional mechanism through which that accepting adult reaches a child whose home does not provide one. A bill actually about protecting children would not have deliberately excluded the most vulnerable children from its protections. The groomer narrative is not about protecting children from LGBTQ people. The bill it produced is about protecting LGBTQ children from nobody, while removing the only adults positioned to help them.
The Receipt
The movement that calls Pride Month unnecessary introduced more than 600 anti-LGBTQ bills per year since 2023, issued four executive orders targeting transgender Americans in the first weeks of the current administration, produced a documented emboldening effect on anti-LGBTQ prejudice and violence confirmed across two presidential elections, and generated a peer-reviewed mental health crisis that the Trevor Project has now measured for seven consecutive years. Pride Month did not emerge from comfort or from a community searching for attention. It emerged from this. The receipt is in the record.
Sartre wrote that the bad faith actor gives ridiculous reasons not to persuade but to disconcert (Sartre, 1946). The goal is not to win the argument. It is to make the person making the argument feel like the argument is the problem. The performance of confusion about why Pride exists is that strategy applied to a community whose suffering is documented in peer-reviewed journals, tracked by federal crime statistics, measured in suicide attempt rates that replicate every year, and encoded in bill numbers with recorded votes. The people performing confusion about why Pride exists are not confused. They voted 217 to 198. They signed the executive orders. They introduced the 616 bills. Engaging the documented record would require them to own what the documented record shows, and Sartre identified the mechanism they use to avoid that: bad faith does not argue against the evidence; it discredits the act of presenting it.
The United States declined in a single year to the fourth most severe stand-alone autocratizer in modern history on every measurable indicator of electoral democracy, freedom of expression, checks and balances, rule of law, and civil rights (Nord et al., 2026). Every LGBTQ American celebrating Pride this month is celebrating inside that decline, alongside the 616 bills, the four executive orders, the 918 documented anti-LGBTQ incidents including seven fatalities, and the seventh consecutive Trevor Project finding that the political environment is placing their community at measurable risk for suicide. The community celebrating this month did not choose to make their existence political. The people who legislated against it did. Pride Month is the documented record of that choice.
References
ACLU. (2023). Mapping attacks on LGBTQ rights in U.S. state legislatures in 2023. https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2023
ACLU. (2024). Mapping attacks on LGBTQ rights in U.S. state legislatures in 2024. https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024
ACLU. (2025). Mapping attacks on LGBTQ rights in U.S. state legislatures in 2025. https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2025
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