By Gillian Schutte
The year 2025 has propelled the global debate on LGBTIQ rights into sharp focus. Donald Trump’s return to the White House has reignited America’s culture wars, with sweeping policies targeting what his administration calls the “radical trans agenda.” Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s rejection of Western-funded LGBTIQ advocacy reflects a broader strategy to protect Russian sovereignty from ideological and geopolitical interference. Both leaders, though ideologically distinct, highlight the manipulation of identity politics and the ways in which corporate, geopolitical, and cultural forces have co-opted LGBTIQ rights.
Liberals often respond to these developments with a combination of moral outrage and shallow analysis, reducing complex dynamics to a binary of progress versus regression. Yet these movements, particularly the trans rights movement, have been seized upon by corporations, pharmaceutical interests, and Western governments as tools of profit and power. The ensuing backlash from both Trump and Putin reveals the broader consequences of these exploitations and raises deeper questions about the direction of LGBTIQ advocacy.
Trump’s return to power exposes a reactionary response to the corporatisation of gender politics. His blunt declaration that “there will only be two genders” is designed to inflame cultural anxieties while reducing complex debates to simplistic binaries. While his executive order, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, resonates with many concerned about fairness in sports and single-sex spaces, it lacks the critical engagement needed to address the commodification of trans identities. Trump’s policies serve as decoys to distract from his own austerity measures, which disproportionately harm women, minorities, and the working class. His cultural crusade deflects attention from these economic harms by turning identity politics into a divisive spectacle.
Putin’s stance reflects a broader critique of how the United States and Western powers wield LGBTIQ rights as geopolitical tools. Since 2013, his government has framed foreign-funded LGBTIQ NGOs as instruments of Western cultural imperialism, designed to destabilise Russian society. Putin argues that these organisations are less about equality and more about soft power disguised as progressivism. This perspective resonates with many nations that have experienced Western LGBTIQ advocacy as a means to undermine sovereignty rather than promote genuine justice.
It is clear to many that the US and Western hegemon promote LGBTIQ rights as hallmarks of liberal democracy, casting nations with conservative cultural policies as regressive. This narrative works to enhance their moral standing while obscuring domestic inequalities, including systemic poverty and racial disparities. Through strategic funding of local LGBTIQ organisations in adversarial states, they foment dissent and create ideological rifts, using identity politics to delegitimise governments. During the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, for instance, Western support for LGBTIQ advocacy was both a cultural signal of alignment with liberal European values and a strategic tool to weaken Russia’s influence. While symbolic victories in identity politics were celebrated in what was a colour revolution, the deeper consequences of economic neoliberalisation and rising inequality were largely ignored.
In the Global South, LGBTIQ advocacy often imposes Western norms with little regard for local contexts, creating resistance and polarisation. Conditional diplomacy, where aid depends on adopting liberal policies, turns rights into weapons of compliance. Slavoj Žižek critiques this as “the fetishisation of difference,” where identity politics is used to reinforce hegemony while leaving global inequalities intact. Through strategic instrumentalisation of LGBTIQ rights, Western powers aim to shift the focus from systemic issues thereby reducing justice to a façade of inclusion while perpetuating deeper exploitation.
Both approaches expose how trans issues have been marketised, instrumentalised and weaponised. The rapid mainstreaming of trans rights has created a lucrative industry centred on puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and surgeries. Pharmaceutical companies have turned trans identities into lifelong consumer bases, exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit. The UK’s Tavistock clinic scandal (Bell v Tavistock [2020] EWHC 3274) highlights these dangers, revealing how children were fast-tracked into medical transitions without sufficient psychological support. Parents were pressured into believing that medical intervention was the only way to safeguard their child’s well-being, while underlying psychological or social factors went unaddressed. This commodification of identity reduces individuals to economic opportunities while masking systemic disparities with the rhetoric of progress.
The inclusion of terms like “birthing people” and “chestfeeding” in public health discourse adds another layer of contention. These terms aim to include trans men and non-binary individuals who may become pregnant or breastfeed. While well-intentioned in recognising diverse identities, the linguistic shift erases the specificity of women’s experiences, reframing them in gender-neutral terms. For many women, this language feels reductive, as it prioritises inclusivity for a minority at the expense of clarity in discussions about biological realities and reproductive healthcare.
Critics argue that this shift places an unfair expectation on women to adapt their language and experiences to accommodate trans sensibilities. Terms like “birthing people” move the focus away from the material and social realities of womanhood, which remain shaped by patriarchy. For instance, debates around access to abortion, maternity leave, and prenatal care are deeply rooted in the realities of sex-based oppression, yet the language now effectively alienates women from their own struggles. In reproductive healthcare settings, this can create confusion and complicate advocacy efforts, where precision and clarity are essential to ensure women’s rights are upheld.
Furthermore, the insistence on adopting such terminology can fragment feminist movements, creating divisions between those who support trans inclusion and those who feel their experiences are being erased. This fragmentation sees the strategic undermining of collective solidarity against shared forms of oppression, particularly as women already face entrenched structural disadvantages within patriarchal societies. By shifting the focus to accommodate individual identities, systemic challenges like unequal pay, lack of childcare support, and domestic violence become side-lined.
The broader focus on individual identity also shifts resources and attention from pressing issues affecting cisgender women, such as access to contraception, maternal mortality rates, and protection against sexual violence. Critics point out that the emphasis on gender-neutral terminology is often driven by institutions that appear progressive but do little to address the underlying inequalities that continue to disproportionately affect women. This dynamic feeds into a neoliberal framework where the language of inclusion is wielded to divert attention from substantive structural reform, leaving patriarchal systems intact.
The 2024 Paris Olympics epitomised these tensions, particularly through its inclusion of trans athletes in women’s categories and its opening ceremony imagery. Dionysus, depicted in blue, presided over a reinterpretation of the Last Supper, symbolising the fluidity and dissolution of boundaries. While celebrated as a progressive statement, this display was widely criticised for its semiotic assertion of cultural hegemony, reflecting the imposition of contested narratives onto global audiences.
The contrasting approaches of Trump and Putin reveal the complexities of LGBTIQ advocacy in 2025. Trump’s reactionary policies exploit cultural divides without addressing systemic challenges, while Putin’s sovereignty-based critique raises legitimate questions about the geopolitical manipulation of human rights. Both, however, expose the broader co-option of LGBTIQ rights by corporate and imperialist agendas.
The growing backlash from leftist movements against what has been dubbed the “trans train” is not a rejection of trans individuals or their legitimate struggles for equality, but rather a response to the corporate exploitation of their identities for profit and control. This exploitation has imposed absurd and unsustainable demands on institutions, from mandating that medical professionals engage exclusively with trans-positive practices—often to the detriment of comprehensive care—to pushing schools to adopt policies that prioritise ideology over critical engagement with parents and communities. The backlash also stems from grotesque misuses of these policies, such as cisgender men opportunistically claiming trans identities to gain access to female prisons or to dominate women’s sports. These cases highlight not the failures of trans individuals but the corporate-driven chaos that undermines societal cohesion, exploiting the trans movement for capitalist and hegemonic ends. The weaponisation of trans rights has resulted in the erasure of other rights, overshadowing the needs of workers, dispossessed communities, children, and women. Far from pushing progress, this exploitation fractures social justice movements and pits marginalised groups against one another.
The conservative backlash to trans rights and broader LGBTIQ "woke" discourse stems from a perception that these movements, driven by corporate and institutional interests, have overstepped into cultural authoritarianism. Critics on the right argue that the rapid mainstreaming of trans issues, often accompanied by policies mandating ideological conformity in schools, workplaces, and public discourse, undermines traditional values and stifles free speech. While some of these criticisms reflect legitimate concerns and intersect with the left, the reaction often veers into outright hostility, conflating genuine struggles for equality with the excesses of corporate-driven identity politics. This polarisation, in turn, erodes the nuanced debate necessary to address these issues meaningfully and equitably.
The bottom line is that both the backlash and corporate exploitation has had devastating consequences for trans and LGBTIQ communities. But ultimately it is the corporate-driven chaos, not the backlash itself, that leads to the cessation of all rights for these individuals. Trump’s sweeping reactionary policies exemplify this, stripping even necessary protections. The indiscriminate removal of trans rights, such as the possibility of fully transitioned trans women being placed in male prisons, is a direct result of the unchecked commodification and weaponisation of the trans movement. It is the exploitation of identities—not the legitimate concerns of critics—that has led to the erosion of dignity and safety for the very people these policies claim to support.
The tragic irony is that marketised exploitation and ideological excess have done more harm to trans and LGBTIQ people than any backlash could. By reducing identities to political tools and economic opportunities, the corporate hijacking of rights movements has betrayed their core principles and left those most vulnerable to bear the brunt of the reaction. The fight against utilisation is not an attack on trans individuals; it is a call to reclaim their rights from the clutches of profit-driven agendas and restore them to the realm of genuine justice and liberation.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Follow Gillian on X - @GillianSchutte1 and on Facebook - Gillian Schutte.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.