The ups and downs of a tumultuous year
The last 12 months have a been a roller coaster for the LGBT community. Still suffering a grief hangover from Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the November 2016 presidential election, when faced with the reality of his inauguration in January, progressives of all stripes stood up to fight back against what many see as a regressive and oppressive regime.
From the women’s marches that saw millions of people take to the streets of cities across the country on Jan. 21, to the Pride parades and marches in June and September; from the crushing results of 2016 election to the renewal of November 2018 when progressive candidates rebounded and at least openly-transgender candidates won office — we look back at six of the stories that shaped our world in 2017.
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Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to “Make America Great Again.” Since being inaugurated last Jan. 20, amid widespread allegations of Russian meddling in the election, the country’s 45th president has proven time again that his version of a great America does not include LGBT people — or people of color, or people of different ethnic or religious backgrounds, or immigrants, or, really, anyone who isn’t a rich, white, cisgender heterosexual.

Despite his half-hearted denials, it’s been crystal clear over the last year that Trump is a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a misogynist, with probably a dash of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure. And in what some are calling The Trump Effect, it’s becoming ever more obvious that those who once felt compelled to try and hide their own racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism now feel empowered to put their hatred and bigotry out on proud display — as the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August clearly proves.

When, in mid-2016, Trump tapped notoriously anti-LGBT former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, it put the LGBT community on notice that a Trump presidency would not be friendly to our community. And once he was inaugurated, it didn’t take long for the administration to start straight-washing federal policies, programs and informational sites.

On Jan. 31 when Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, Gorsuch was on recording as saying that civil rights issues, like marriage equality, should be decided through elections or legislative action and had, in lower court rulings, signaled support for allowing “religious liberty” claims to outweigh civil rights.

Trump went on to nominate the supremely unqualified and anti-LGBT Betsy DeVos as secretary of Education and racist homophobe Jeff Sessions as attorney general, and he has continued to nominate other homophobes to positions of power within his administration.

In the first two weeks of his presidency, the Trump administration removed any policy stances or language regarding the LGBTQ community from official government web pages.

By the beginning of February, media outlets were reporting that Trump was set to sign an executive order that would allow employers, businesses, schools and even healthcare providers to refuse services to LGBT people on the grounds of religious freedom. While that executive order was never signed in that form, it signaled the administration’s intent to do all it could to roll back the LGBT community’s progress toward equality.

In February the administration rescinded the Obama administration’s federal guidance recommending equal treatment of transgender students in public schools, and by March 20, the Center for American Progress had discovered that the administration had removed all mention of LGBT people from the the National Survey of Older

Americans Act Participants and the Annual Program Performance Report for Centers for Independent Living. A week later, reports leaked that the administration had canceled plans to add the LGBTQ community to the 2020 U.S. Census.

As more and more horrific reports leaked out of Chechnya that gay men were being abducted, tortured and killed by the government there, and by family members doing the government’s bidding, other world leaders spoke out to condemn the torture. But U.S. officials remained silent until April 17 when Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, finally spoke up. Trump himself, however, still hasn’t condemned the torture and murders.

In May, Trump offered up a 2018 budget that proposed cuts to any number of programs affecting LGBT lives, including the Ryan White HIV/AIDS programs, the Centers for Disease Control and Planned Parenthood, while at the same time pushing relentlessly for Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

In late May, DeVos told the House Appropriations Committee that states should get to decide whether schools receiving federal funds can intentionally discriminate against LGBT students. In mid-June, DeVos invited representatives from two anti-LGBT organizations, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, to speak at a

Department of Education conference, the same day Pro Publica published contents of a DOE memo ordering the process for investigating civil rights complaints in schools to be rolled back.

During the eight years that Barack Obama was president, the LGBT community had grown accustomed to declarations from the White House recognizing June as National LGBT Pride Month. In 2017, not only did Trump completely ignore Pride Month, he instead went out of his way to deliver a speech at a conference hosted by the anti-LGBT Faith and Freedom Coalition.

On June 30, Trump named Bethany Kozma — an infamous anti-transgender activist — as senior advisor to the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

At the beginning of July, a year after the Obama administration announced that the ban on recruitment of and service by openly-transgender people in the U.S. military would end, Defense Secretary Mattis unceremoniously announced that ending ban on new transgender recruits would be delayed. And then, on July 26, Trump announced via Twitter that transgender people would be banned from serving in the military in any capacity.

He made the ban official a month later with a memo to the Department of Justice, and several advocacy organizations, representing transgender servicemembers, immediately filed suit challenging the ban. As of December, a federal court in Washington, D.C., had ruled against the ban, ordering the military to begin accepting transgender recruits as of Jan. 1.

On Oct. 5, AG Sessions reversed a federal policy protecting transgender employees from workplace discrimination. On Oct. 11, the National Park Services withdrew its sponsorship of New York City’s first permanent Pride Flag, at the Stonewall Inn, and canceled its planned participation in the flag dedication ceremony.

On Oct. 13, Trump outraged LGBT advocates when he became the Family Research Council’s anti-LGBT Values Voter Summit, and less than a week later, he added insult by speaking at the annual meeting of another rabidly anti-LGBT organization, the Heritage Foundation.

Just days later, the LGBT outrage jumped several notches higher when, in a profile on Pence, the New Yorker quoted Trump as joking with reporters not to ask Pence about LGBT people because “he wants to hang them all.”

In late October, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case — in which a Colorado baker is fighting under the banner of religious freedom for his right to refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, in violation of Colorado state law banning discrimination — Trump’s Department of Justice weighed in on the side of discrimination, even filing a formal request to speak during oral arguments.

In early November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture posted a statement on its website supporting the discussion, display and distribution of religious materials on “same-sex marriage, gender identity and sexual morality,” by USDA personnel and those working in facilities inspected by the USDA.

And in December, the Washington Post reported that Trump had banned the Centers for Disease Control from using seven words — diversity, evidence-based, entitlement, fetus, science-based, transgender and vulnerable — from all documents dealing with the preparation of next year’s budget. The director of the CDC has denied those reports, but the rumors persist.

Just as he ignored National Pride Month completely, Trump made no mention of the LGBT community — one of the populations hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS pandemic — in this Dec. 1 World AIDS Day speech.

Even this exhaustive list does not include all the ways the Trump administration has targeted the LGBT community for discrimination. For example, LGBT people make up a significant percentage of communities that would suffer most from most of Trump’s pet issues — repeal of the Affordable Care Act, repeal of DACA and the recent passage of a so-called tax reform bill that will add more than $1 trillion to the deficit.

But amid the anger, the fear and the hatred that the Trump Effect has unleashed on the country, there have been some shining moments — moments of resistance, of small victories, of hope. It started on Inauguration Day with riots in the streets of Washington, D.C., that, while destructive and frightening, were proof that people would not allow fascism to reign unopposed.

The very next day, millions of women and their allies took to the streets — in D.C., in cities around the country including Dallas and Fort Worth, in cities around the world — in a show of strength, in a show of resistance, in a show of power. In fact, what has been on one hand the Year of Trump has, on the other, been the year of the woman, as the #MeToo movement continues to gain strength and sexual predators and their enablers are being pulled from their seats of power and influence.

And as the year draws to a close, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is closing in on Trump and those who have aided his rise to power. Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos has already pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI regarding contact with Russian agents and is cooperating with investigators. Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates are under indictment on unrelated charges brought by Mueller, and former National Security Advisor

Michael Flynn has been indicted and is cooperating with investigators.

More indictments are expected soon, and are expected to reach into Trump’s own family, even to the president himself.

— Tammye Nash