So-called “Pride Month” this year was … not so much.
I noted last July that corporate support for DEI was already in decline. That was largely due to backlash from some woke corporate marketing campaigns in 2023 pandering to the gender-confusion cult, particularly the so-called “transgender” crowd who clearly exhibit gender pathology.
Retailer Target and Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light beer brand suffered substantial losses as a result of their ill-advised campaigns, and other companies have gotten the message. Consequently, a growing list of major corporations and organizations were dialing back their virtue-signal pandering.
In early June, Emmy Griffin wrote, “Both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have reported that numerous corporate sponsors have pulled out, scaled back, or otherwise opted to be silent supporters of Pride Month 2025 activities.”
As Nate Jackson concluded: “Maybe it’s a reaction to the overreach of leftist culture warriors foisting ‘pride’ on everyone through increasingly lewd public displays, often billed as ostensibly ‘family friendly.’ Maybe it’s simply that more people are figuring out that Pride Month is gross. … Pride Month 2025 has been more muted than in years past.”
Yes, the Rainbow Mafia is still after famed author J.K. Rowling for taking a position in defense of women against those who pretend to be women.
And yes, there is still a pretender in Congress, Tim “Sarah” McBride, walking around in a dress.
But the month ended on a high note and with a harbinger for men invading women’s sports.
The University of Pennsylvania wisely submitted to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning males from competing in women’s sports. Notably, UPenn was the school where a man, William “Lia” Thomas, was allowed to compete on the women’s swimming team, breaking numerous women’s swimming school records and winning the 2022 national championship in the 500-yard freestyle.
The Ivy League school reached its decision as part of an agreement to settle a federal civil rights case raised by the Department of Education over UPenn’s failure to uphold Title IX protections for women’s sports. The agreement also includes UPenn sending personalized apology letters to each swimmer impacted by having to compete against Thomas, in which the school admits it was wrong in allowing a male to compete in female categories.
One reason for the slide in corporate and public support for the “LGBT-ad nauseam” chapter of the Left’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda is that the ugliness of that chapter is being exposed for what it really is. Astoundingly, Democrats and their gender-confused constituencies have ramped up their deviant “degenderization” agenda, including so-called “gender-affirming” surgery (a.k.a. gender mutilation surgery) on ever-younger children.
And that brings me to an article by a high-profile fitness and media personality, Jillian Michaels, titled “Why I, a gay woman, can’t celebrate Pride Month now that it’s been hijacked by leather daddies, drag shows and corporate stunts.”
Michaels writes: “I’ve never been ‘proud’ to be gay. … Pride Month has ballooned into a 30-day spectacle that now feels less about unity and more about domination — cultural, corporate, and political. … Let’s be honest… We’re not fighting for survival. We’re fighting for relevance — and it shows. Pride Month today has become a lightning rod, not because gay people are asking to be treated equally, but because the month has become synonymous with shock value, sexual exhibitionism, and corporate hypocrisy.”
She continues: “We’ve all seen the footage. Leather daddies in assless chaps simulating sex acts in public. Drag queens twerking in thongs in front of children. Parades that look more like adult fetish conventions than civil rights celebrations. … We’re told Pride is about ‘inclusion,’ but increasingly it feels like a middle finger to anyone who doesn’t co-sign every fringe performance or ideology. If you so much as raise an eyebrow at what’s happening on your city’s main street, you’re labeled a bigot, even if you’re gay yourself. You don’t have to be a conservative Christian mom to think that maybe the Pride movement has lost the plot.”
Michaels concludes: “So let’s stop building walls out of rainbows and start building bridges. Real pride doesn’t need a stage, a sponsor, or a spotlight. It doesn’t demand applause. It is lived — quietly, confidently, unapologetically. Every single day.”
Her assessment is similar to that of a high-profile activist, Andrew Sullivan, who took his criticism one step further in The New York Times, to chastise the radicalization of the movement, which is now grooming kids.
Sullivan notes: “Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives … gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the ‘social justice’ left, they radicalized. … I’ve long lived in a gay world that is skewed left, and, along with my fellow gay non-lefties, I’ve long made my peace with it, or tried to. But this new [transgender] ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology.”
He continues: “In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule: Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids. You can bring up your children however you like, we promised. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone. So what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused almost entirely on children and minors. … Kids all over the country were impacted. Your children were taught in elementary school that being a boy or a girl was something they could choose and change at will. Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl (i.e. a biological male) in athletics. Children in elementary school got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge or permission…”
Sullivan concludes: “Gallup found that satisfaction with the acceptance of gay and lesbian people peaked at 62 percent in 2022 but dropped to 51 percent in January of this year. People in the center and on the right — whom some of us have spent a lifetime engaging — are being lost. Gallup showed Republican support for gay marriage dropping from 55 percent in 2022 to 41 percent in 2025. … Fighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.”
As the top comment under Sullivan’s article notes: “Being co-opted by gender extremists is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the gay rights movement. And the Democratic party, incidentally.”
Those are bold statements by Michaels and Sullivan. And like Rowling, I suspect they will now be subject to hateful efforts to cancel their voice. Michaels already had a target on her back having disclosed earlier that she voted for Trump in 2024.
