‘We see you’: In Trump-era Washington, World Pride 2025 organizers aim to bring ‘hope’ to LGBTQ+ community

Pride Month in the nation’s capital this year is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of participants across three weeks of programming consisting of over 300 events for World Pride 2025, an annual international festival that celebrates the LGBTQ+ community.

Organizers for the global celebration this year told ABC News they are emphasizing messages of resistance, resilience and, above all, hope at a time when LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly the transgender community, are being targeted on various fronts by the Trump administration.

World Pride 2025 makes its way back to the U.S. for the first time since 2019, when organizers chose New York City to host the festival the same year as the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

World Pride 2025 events began May 17 and will culminate the weekend of June 7 and 8 with the annual parade and street festival. Included in the programming are events and partnerships with minority groups, including DC Latinx Pride, API Pride, Trans Pride, DC Black Pride, Youth Pride and DC Silver Pride for senior members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Ryan Bos is the executive director of the Capital Pride Alliance, which organizes Pride Month programming in D.C. each year. He has been spearheading the planning of World Pride since last year and says that the celebration this year is “more important than ever.”

“It’s surreal on days to think that the country that I was born into, the country that I have grown to have a lot of pride in — a country that I have devoted my professional and personal time in regards to creating spaces for people to feel welcome, to feel included, to make sure people feel seen and are valued — that in that country, we are now in a space where overtly, our federal government is saying certain people aren’t as valued,” Bos said. “And that hurts, and it’s scary.”

During his first weeks in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that the U.S. government will only recognize a person’s gender assigned at birth. More executive orders targeted the transgender community in the military and in athletic spaces.

Marissa Miller, founder of the National Trans Visibility March, said that with attention focused on her community, this year, “humanity is on the line.”

“This is a revolutionary time,” she said. “We’ve been somewhere near here before, but I think that it’s been a while since we have been here.”

As a Black transgender woman, Miller emphasized that some members of the community have always felt like they had target on their backs.

“These are dangerous times — not unprecedented, dangerous times — for trans people, even more dangerous than they have been because there has been a permission set that says we do not exist,” Miller said.

In leading Pride Month planning this year, Bos said that security and safety have been at the forefront of many conversations. While D.C. is ready and welcoming, he said that it’s important for attendees and participants to understand any potential risks their international friends may have in travel.

Organizers and groups from several countries have already opted out of coming to World Pride this year, including those from Canada and some countries in Africa, Miller told ABC News.

Ry Schissler, a swimmer and cyclist from Toronto who decided not to travel to the United States for World Pride this year, citing decisions by the Trump administration. Schissler, who identifies as transgender and nonbinary, holds Canadian-American dual citizenship. Schissler’s team, the Toronto Purple Fins, a self-described “gender free” swimming group, had planned to come to D.C. in June for the IGLA+ Aquatic Championships and World Pride, but Schissler didn’t want to lead the team to a country where the group didn’t feel welcomed.

“There’s so many benefits to participating in sports, particularly team sports, and … trans people have been discouraged from that and actively banned from it,” Schissler said. “In a lot of cases, it’s so important to recognize how difficult it is for us to do that, much less travel internationally, to show up to an event where we’re clearly not wanted by a lot of people.”

Even though Schissler and the rest of the team planned to make the trip, they decided against it in the winter following Trump’s executive orders.

“Wherever I go, I have to be on my toes. And when I’m outside my comfort zone — the places that I go and know that there are people to support me — it’s hard,” Schissler added.

With the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ spaces and diversity equity and inclusion practices, Bos, the World Pride organizer, said that corporate partnerships this year have been more difficult to secure out of fear of losing federal funding.

Another one of Trump’s January executive orders not only banned DEI practices in the federal government, but also called on those in the private sector to end what the order calls “illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.”

According to Bos, some companies that had regularly sponsored Capital Pride in the past were “dragging their feet” to commit to World Pride 2025 as they waited for the outcome of the 2024 presidential election and some eventually backed out or lessened their support.

Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, Comcast and Darcars are some of the companies that previously supported the Capital Pride Alliance that will not be sponsors for World Pride 2025, according to Bos. ABC News has not received a response after reaching out to the companies for comment.

But Bos says that he hopes the community persists, believing that “human decency and respect will ultimately win out.”

“My hope is that we can show that through World Pride and letting, again, folks know that there are people standing in our corner, that there are people willing to stand up, to be visible, to be heard, and that they’re not alone. And that they see hope in the future,” he said.