As LGBTQ+ people go back into the closet under Trump, the Human Rights Campaign reveals plan to fight back

In Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House, where President Donald Trump is directing what civil rights advocates describe as an accelerating authoritarian overhaul of federal power, the Human Rights Campaign on Thursday released a new political playbook and a stark assessment of what the first year of Trump’s second term has meant for LGBTQ+ Americans.

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The organization’s twin reports, One Year Out: LGBTQ+ Messaging Playbook for the Midterms and One Year In: LGBTQ+ Americans Under the Trump Administration, sketch both a campaign strategy and a warning flare. Together, they argue that LGBTQ+ Americans are becoming less visible, less safe, and less secure as federal protections shrink and culture war policies are nationalized.

Human Rights Campaign Chief of Staff Jay Brown introduces HRC President Kelley Robinson at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.Christopher Wiggins for The Advocate

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“These are harrowing times,” HRC President Kelley Robinson told a room of strategists, advocates, and journalists. “The emergency that we warned about is no longer a warning. It is the reality that we are living inside.”

In 2023, as Republicans began targeting the LGBTQ+ community in legislatures nationwide, HRC issued a national state of emergency.

A quiet retreat

Nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults now report being less “out” than they were a year ago, according to HRC’s new national survey. More than half say they are less visible in public life. Two-thirds of transgender and nonbinary Americans report difficulty accessing health care. Robinson described what the numbers mean in daily life: parents hiding who they are at their children’s schools, workers shrinking themselves to keep their jobs, and couples thinking twice before holding hands on the street.

“I’m going to say that again,” Robinson said. “Nearly half of LGBTQ+ people say that they are less out than they were just a year ago.”

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She translated the numbers into lived reality: parents hiding who they are at their children’s schools, workers shrinking themselves to keep their jobs, patients avoiding doctors’ offices, and couples thinking twice before holding hands on the street.

HRC President Kelley Robinson introduces the organization's twin reports on life for LGBTQ+ people in the second Trump administration.Christopher Wiggins for The Advocate

Two-thirds of transgender and nonbinary Americans now report difficulty accessing health care, she said, as federal HIV research funding has been slashed and hospitals turn patients away. At work, LGBTQ+ people report rising discrimination and declining safety, with more than 80 percent of those experiencing bias considering leaving their jobs, instability that ripples through families, housing, and local economies.

Robinson said the administration has “nationalized” policies once confined to conservative statehouses, weakening civil rights enforcement, slashing public health investment, and redirecting federal resources toward immigration enforcement, accelerating what she described as a systematic erosion of safety, dignity, and economic security.

A doctrine of offense

HRC’s new playbook urges candidates to reject cautious, defensive campaigning and instead define themselves before opponents do, lead with shared values, confront misinformation directly, and go on offense.

Robinson cited recent elections as proof of concept: Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger’s 15-point win in Virginia, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s victory in New Jersey, and Omaha, Nebraska, Mayor John Ewing Jr.’s race, in which culture war attacks were met with a blunt refrain: “My opponent is focused on potties. I’m focused on potholes.”

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In an interview with The Advocate, Robinson said HRC is pressing the incoming Spanberger administration to immediately and fully enforce the Virginia Values Act, the state’s nondiscrimination law, particularly in schools and other public spaces.

“Our number one ask is full enforcement and implementation of the Virginia Values Act,” Robinson said. “That will make sure that in schools, workplaces, and public spaces, people get the dignity and respect they deserve.”

HRC President Kelley Robinson, Global Strategy Group Senior Vice President Joey Teitelbaum, Reproductive Freedom For All Preident Mini Timmaraju, and MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart discuss the state of LGBTQ+ Americans under the second Trump administration.Christopher Wiggins for The Advocate

She added, “People cast their vote as a hope and a prayer for the future they want. What we saw in Virginia is a bellwether for what we’ll see across the country, people rebuking extremism and demanding leaders who focus on affordability, safe schools, and real solutions.”

She added that Spanberger’s inauguration on Saturday, which will include LGBTQ+ groups in official events, signals a more welcoming vision of the state.

“Virginia is not just for lovers,” Robinson said. “Virginia is for everybody.”

Voters are not where Republicans think they are

Joey Teitelbaum, senior vice president of research at Global Strategy Group, said battleground polling conducted with HRC reveals that Republicans have misread public sentiment on LGBTQ+ equality.

Her firm has never found more than 18 percent of voters in any state who believe being transgender should be illegal, meaning more than four in five voters are not aligned with efforts to legislate transgender people out of public life. Democrats, she said, hold roughly a two-to-one trust advantage on LGBTQ+ issues.

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But Teitelbaum also argued that voters instinctively recognize a broader pattern, that policies aimed at transgender Americans are part of a recurring cycle of removing rights from marginalized communities.

“People see how the persecution of one can lead to the persecution of many,” she said, noting that the Equality Act’s overwhelming popularity allows it to be framed as the modern analogue of the Civil Rights Act, especially among Black voters. “When we make that connection explicit, it reframes the entire conversation.”

The freedom frame and connecting the dots

Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom For All, echoed that analysis, urging candidates to link abortion restrictions, anti-trans policies, immigration crackdowns, and attacks on protesters as part of the same governing philosophy.

She described the U.S. Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling in Dobbs as “the first hit on DEI,” stripping bodily autonomy and opening the door to broader rollbacks.

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“They did this to women and people who could get pregnant,” Timmaraju said. “Of course, they can do this to trans kids. Of course, they can do this to people protesting ICE in their communities.”

Reframing the national story

Jonathan Capehart, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and co-host of The Weekend on MS NOW, who until recently also served as an associate editor at The Washington Post, said the most alarming finding in the new HRC data is how quietly LGBTQ+ Americans are disappearing from public life.

“That’s people deciding it’s safer to disappear,” Capehart said.

He urged newsrooms to stop treating LGBTQ+ coverage as siloed or niche and instead integrate LGBTQ+ experiences into national reporting on economic insecurity, workplace instability, and health care access. He said that at editorial meetings with his producers and co-hosts ahead of each show, conversations about guests to book on the program involve issues of intersectinality.

“When we talk about staying in your job, when we talk about health care access, LGBTQ+ people are right in the middle of those stories,” he said. “They’re not an aside. They’re not a footnote.”

The shadow of Renee Nicole Good

As the briefing unfolded, the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a poet, mother of three, and member of the LGBTQ+ community, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, loomed heavily over the room.

Advocates have questioned the federal government’s account of the shooting, arguing that Good was not a threat but a neighbor observing ICE activity in her community. Her death, mere blocks from where George Floyd was murdered, has become a flashpoint in the national debate over immigration enforcement and federal power, and a haunting emblem of what Robinson described as the growing human cost of normalized state violence.

A message to those retreating

After the event, Robinson was asked what she would say to LGBTQ+ Americans who are frightened, exhausted, or quietly retreating from public life.

“You are enough,” she said. “Every day that you show up being exactly who you are is as much resistance as you’ve got to have.”

HRC plans to deploy its playbook nationwide, mobilizing what it calls up to 75 million “Equality Voters” ahead of the 2026 midterms.