Pride is patriotic. 🏳️🌈🇺🇸
Pride is a protest. And Pride is for all of us.
As we enter Pride Month, Women Forward stands in full solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, now and always.
Pride didn’t begin with a parade. It began with a rebellion.
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City fought back against a police raid, igniting days of protests that would give birth to the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The people who threw the first punches, who stood their ground and refused to be erased, were largely Black and brown, transgender and gender-nonconforming. They were the most marginalized among the marginalized, and they changed history. We must say their names.
Whose shoulders we stand on
Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman and tireless activist, was at Stonewall that night and remained a fierce advocate for queer and trans liberation until her death in 1992. Her friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman, co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to support homeless queer and trans youth. Audre Lorde, the incomparable Black lesbian poet and theorist, gave us the language to understand that our liberation is bound together. “I am not free while any woman is unfree,” she wrote, “even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
These leaders didn’t just fight for LGBTQ+ rights. They fought for an intersectional vision of justice: one that understood race, gender, sexuality, and class as inseparable. That vision is the foundation of Pride. It is the foundation of Women Forward. And it is the America we are fighting to build.
Every American deserves to love openly and live authentically. That is not a radical idea. It is a fundamentally American one.
Celebrating Pride is more important than ever
We will not pretend that this Pride Month arrives without a shadow over it. The Trump administration and Republican legislatures across the country have waged a relentless campaign against LGBTQ+ Americans, with a particular focus on targeting transgender people and the families who love them.
In the past year alone, hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures. Transgender youth have been denied gender-affirming care, a denial that major medical associations warn puts lives at risk. Books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and history have been pulled from school libraries. Federal protections have been rolled back. Funding for LGBTQ+ health programs has been cut. The message being sent from the highest levels of our government is clear: you do not belong here.
We reject that message, completely and without equivocation.
Pride is resistance
To celebrate Pride in this moment is a political act, because those in power want LGBTQ+ Americans to feel invisible, unsafe, and alone. But Pride has always been a protest. The first marches were not corporate spectacles. They were acts of courage by people who had nothing left to lose and everything to fight for.
That spirit is alive today in the activists organizing in red states, the parents showing up to school board meetings, the attorneys fighting discriminatory laws in court, and the trans youth who simply go to school each day and refuse to disappear. We honor every single one of them.
At Women Forward, we know that the fight for women’s rights and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights are the same fight. When the government polices bodies, erases identities, and punishes difference, all of us are threatened. Our solidarity is not performative. It is strategic, principled, and deep.
Pride started as a protest. In 2026, it still is.
Here is what you can do this month:
Show up to a local Pride event and bring friends who might otherwise stay home.
Donate to or volunteer with organizations on the front lines of LGBTQ+ legal defense and advocacy. Check out the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, the Trevor Project, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and the Transgender Law Center (TLC).
Amplify the voices of Black and brown queer and trans leaders who are too often pushed to the margins of the very movement they built.
Contact your elected representatives and make clear that attacks on LGBTQ+ Americans are attacks on all Americans and you won’t stand for it.
And if you are a parent, educator, or community member, be explicit about your support. Your visibility matters to a young person who may not have anyone else in their corner.
This June, and every month, Women Forward is proud to stand with the LGBTQ+ community. Because freedom is not divisible. Because love is not a threat. And because the America we believe in has room for all of us.
Happy Pride. Now let’s get to work.