We Did Not Come This Far to Only Come This Far

Casandra Townsel
Jun 1
7 min read

Let me be clear about something from jump: Pride was never a parade. It was a riot. A rebellion born in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when the most marginalized people in the room — Black trans women, gay men of color, poor queer kids with nowhere else to go — decided they were done being hunted. Done being raided. Done being erased. And they fought back.

So every June when we pull out the rainbow flags and post our little Instagram squares, I need us to hold that. Because the joy? It's real. But so is the weight. And this year, the weight is heavy.

"Pride has always been a protest. The question is whether we're willing to stay in the streets

when the confetti settles."

The Ones Who Threw the First Brick

History loves to sanitize itself. The mainstream telling of Pride often centers white, cisgender gay men. But the truth- the unedited, unapologetic truth is that this movement was built on the backs of Black and Brown trans women who had everything to lose and gave everything anyway.

Marsha P. Johnson

A Black trans woman, drag queen, sex worker, and relentless activist — Marsha was 23 years old during the Stonewall uprising and one of its most visible leaders. She co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Sylvia Rivera, creating the first LGBTQ+ youth shelter in North America. When the same movement she helped spark tried to push her out — because of her skin and her heels — she marched ahead of the parade anyway. Her death in 1992 remains an open homicide investigation. She deserved better. We owe her more than a mural.

Sylvia Rivera

Venezuelan and Puerto Rican, trans, 17 years old at Stonewall — Sylvia reportedly said, "I'm not missing a minute of this. It's the revolution!" and she meant it. She fought her entire life to ensure that trans people, especially trans people of color, weren't thrown away by the very community they built. "Gay rights are human rights," she said, long before it became a bumper sticker. She was right then. We still need her to be heard now.

These women were pushed out of the very movement they ignited, deemed "too much," too brown, too trans by white gay activists who wanted respectability over revolution. Let that sink in. And let it be a reminder: when we fight for "LGBTQ+ rights" without centering the most vulnerable, we are repeating the same erasure.

How Far We've Come — And It Is Real

Now look. I believe in celebrating progress. Healing requires us to acknowledge the wins — and there have been wins worth celebrating. Real ones. Hard-fought, bled-for ones.

1969

Stonewall Uprising. Six nights of resistance in Greenwich Village. The modern LGBTQ+ rights movement is born — lit by the hands of trans women of color.

1973

APA removes homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Being queer is no longer officially classified as a mental illness. (It never was one.)

2003

Lawrence v. Texas. The Supreme Court strikes down sodomy laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy. Loving who you love is no longer a crime. Took long enough.

2010

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed. LGBTQ+ service members can finally serve openly. A step toward dignity in uniform — though the fight is still not over.

2015

Obergefell v. Hodges. Marriage equality becomes the law of the land — 50 states. This was the moment millions wept. Real joy. Hard-won freedom.

2020

Bostock v. Clayton County. The Supreme Court rules 6-3 that Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

2024

Sarah McBride becomes the first openly transgender person elected to the U.S. Congress. History. Living, walking, voting history.

Yes. We celebrate these. We hold them. We remember who paid the price for every one of them. And then — we look at where we are in 2026 and we get back to work.

Now Let's Talk About the Numbers

Because this is not a feeling. This is data. And data doesn't lie — even when politicians do.

36%

of LGBTQI+ adults in the U.S. reported experiencing discrimination in 2024 — across health care, employment, education, and housing

40%

of LGBTQI+ people of color reported discrimination — higher than their white LGBTQI+ peers at every measure

62%

of transgender adults reported experiencing some form of discrimination in 2024 — nearly half encountered it in stores and public spaces

530+

anti-LGBTQI+ bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2024 alone. In one year. That is not a typo.

Source: Center for American Progress / NORC at the University of Chicago, LGBTQI+ Community Survey 2024

And here is what I need my community — my Black community — to understand: Black LGBTQ+ people sit at the sharpest edge of all of this. An estimated 1.2 million adults in the U.S. identify as both Black and LGBTQ+. They face compounded discrimination: anti-Blackness and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry stacked on top of each other like a weight designed to crush.

Research from The Trevor Project found that among Black LGBTQ+ young people, rates of suicide attempts increased directly as they experienced additional forms of discrimination. Racial discrimination and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination don't operate separately — they are bound together. Which means our liberation has to be bound together too.

Source: The Trevor Project, Research Brief: Discrimination among Black LGBTQ+ Young People and Suicide Risk

This is why I say — as a Black woman, as a therapist, as someone whose people have always known what it means to be both loved and hunted — we cannot separate our racial justice work from our LGBTQ+ advocacy. To do so is to abandon our own. And we don't do that.

"You cannot celebrate Pride and stay silent about what's happening to Black trans women. You cannot love 'the community' and erase the ones who built it."

The Storm We're In Right Now

Let's be honest about 2025 and 2026. Because sugar-coating it does nobody any good. On January 20, 2025 — Day One of the second Trump administration — executive orders began rolling back decades of hard-fought protections. Not slowly. Not quietly. On Day One.

What Has Been Undone

Identity erasure by executive order: An EO titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism" declared the federal government will only recognize two sexes — male and female — and ordered agencies to end all reference to gender identity. Trans and nonbinary people were legally erased from federal recognition overnight.

Workplace protections stripped: Executive Order 11246 — a civil rights protection in place since 1965 — was revoked, removing nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ employees of federal contractors. Nearly 14,000 transgender federal employees and 100,000+ LGBTQ federal contractor employees lost workplace protections in one signature.

Military ban reinstated: Transgender service members were again banned from serving openly — reversing protections restored under the Biden administration.

Gender-affirming care for youth attacked: An executive order directing agencies to "significantly limit" access to gender-affirming care for minors, contradicting every major medical association including the AMA, AAP, and APA.

Passports and identity documents: The State Department suspended processing of passport applications with an "X" gender marker. In November 2025, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to require sex designation to align with "biological sex." Trans people's identities — literally stripped from their documents.

I want to be real with you: this is not a policy disagreement. This is an assault on human beings' right to exist. And every major medical association — every one — has said that gender-affirming care is evidence-based, medically necessary, and life-saving. This is junk science dressed in legislative power, and it is causing harm.

Meanwhile, the LGBTQ+ legal community is fighting back. Organizations like the ACLU, the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association, Lambda Legal, and the Human Rights Campaign are in courtrooms across this country — filing injunctions, winning temporary blocks, refusing to let these orders stand unchallenged. The resistance is real. And it needs our support.

What We Must Do

I am not a pessimist. I am a realist who chooses hope anyway — because that's what we do. That's what Blackness has always done. We have survived things that were designed to end us. We have built beauty out of brutality. And we will keep going. But going requires showing up.

Know who started this. Teach your children that Pride began with Black and Brown trans women throwing their lives on the line. That history is not optional.

Get specific with your allyship. "I support LGBTQ+ rights" is not enough when Black trans women are the most targeted, the most murdered, the most abandoned. Name them. Fund them. Vote for their lives.

Support organizations doing the work. Especially those led by LGBTQ+ people of color. Your dollar, your platform, and your vote are all forms of advocacy.

Check in on your LGBTQ+ family. Especially right now. The mental health toll of watching your identity become a political weapon is immense. Ask how they're doing. Mean it. And if they need professional support, let them know that help exists — affirming, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed.

Stay loud. When the parade ends, the policy fights don't. Vote in every election — school boards, city council, state legislators. These are the people writing the laws that are hurting our community right now.