New York City's Pride March closed out Pride Month with tens of thousands in the streets, chanting 'We will not be erased' as the Trump administration continues rolling back trans rights. The celebration was also a protest, rooted in the same Stonewall spirit that sparked the modern LGBTQ+ movement in 1969.

I read about Carlos Duarte travelling in from Long Island to be there, and something about that detail stayed with me. He wasn't making a political statement for the cameras. He just said he wanted to be together, for love and peace, and to show the world who they are. That is not a slogan, but a person who got on a train because being visible felt necessary, and because being surrounded by people who see you matters when the wider political climate is busy insisting you are a problem to be solved.

Pride events have always held celebration and activism in the same hand. This year the balance tilted harder than most. The Trump administration removed a rainbow Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument earlier this year, only to back down after a lawsuit. Republican governors declared June "Nuclear Family Month" as a deliberate counter. Federal subpoenas landed at hospitals demanding the medical records of trans patients. A judge has temporarily blocked that demand, but the fact that it was issued at all tells you something about the temperature.

When hospitals stop providing care

The sharpest tension inside the parade itself came from a place that should feel like safety: hospitals. Several New York City institutions announced they were stopping gender-affirming care for trans young people, citing funding threats from the Trump administration. Trans families and activists responded by calling on Heritage of Pride to bar those hospital contingents from marching.

Christen Clifford, a mother of two trans children, said it plainly at a news conference before the parade: "How can you let institutions that are actively harming queer kids march in Pride?" She asked New York City to enforce the state laws already on the books protecting gender-affirming care. Her children are trans. The hospitals those children might need have pulled back. And she stood at a microphone and said so, clearly and without apology, which takes a kind of courage that deserves more than a passing mention.

Heritage of Pride said it has been in conversation with the hospitals, and noted that the parade contingents are organised by LGBTQ+ employee groups rather than by the administrators who made the decisions about care. That is a real distinction, and a genuinely difficult position to navigate. But the families living with the consequences of those decisions are also real, and their anger is completely legitimate. When hospitals retreat under federal pressure and leave trans youth without the care they need, the cost is not abstract. It lands in specific families, in specific children, right now.

Joy is not the opposite of resistance

I want to push back against the idea, which surfaces every Pride season, that celebration and seriousness are somehow in tension. They are not. Pride began at Stonewall on 28 June 1969, when the people inside a bar refused to be arrested quietly and something shifted. The marches that followed the year after were not parties that happened to be political. They were acts of collective presence in a world that kept insisting LGBTQ+ people should be invisible, ashamed, or afraid.

Fifty-seven years later, tens of thousands of people walked the same streets in New York and San Francisco on the same anniversary, and they brought with them the same basic insistence: we are here, we are not going anywhere, and we refuse to be made smaller. That is not naive. It is not a distraction from the serious work. It is, in many ways, the point of the serious work.

The Queer Liberation March, the newer, less corporate sibling of the main NYC parade, also took place on Sunday. The fact that there are now multiple marches, arguing with each other about tactics and inclusion and what Pride should mean, is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of a community large enough and alive enough to disagree. I find that genuinely heartening.

What it means to insist on being seen

Chris Piedmont from Heritage of Pride said: "As LGBTQIA+ events and symbols are being erased, it's vital that our community have safe spaces to show up and march to make clear: We are here." That sentence lands differently when you know that the flag had been removed from the Stonewall monument, that hospitals are withdrawing care, that the Justice Department has been demanding patient records. It is not a slogan in those circumstances. It is a direct response to a direct threat.

Trans people, and particularly trans young people, are at the sharpest end of all of this. The funding threats, the subpoenas, the hospital withdrawals: those decisions do not stay in the realm of politics. They reach into the lives of specific children and their families, people like Christen Clifford and her two kids, who showed up at a news conference and asked the organisations that claim to support them to actually do so.

Pride Month ends. The work does not. But there is something that matters about tens of thousands of people choosing, on a Sunday in June, to walk through the city together and say: we will not be erased. I believe them.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.