For a while, it was starting to look dangerously like we were winning. Marriage equality was slowly being achieved across the world. Pride festivals grew into major celebrations. Rainbow flags were flown outside government buildings and community clubs. Now, in 2026, we’re once again fighting for the right to exist, writes Neha Madhok and Luke Robinson.
Across the world, we’re witnessing coordinated political attacks against LGBTIQA+ people. It isn’t confined to one country. It’s appearing in different forms but with coordinated language and strategy.
In the United Kingdom, Reform has pledged to remove Pride flags, defund local pride events, and diversity initiatives from councils under Reform’s control. ‘Pride’ is being framed in the language of ideology to manufacture division.
In Australia, drag performances and queer events are becoming targets of organised Christian protests with recent demonstrations outside Divine Playhouse in Sydney framed as being about ‘Christian values’. Trans-exclusionary activists continue to campaign for the erasure of transgender people under the guise of ‘women’s rights’. They portray trans people as a major social threat rather than a relatively small group of people simply seeking to live their lives peacefully.
It’s all part of a broader political playbook. Enter, once again, the Culture War.
Far-right politicians are trained to use fear, one of the most effective tools in the fascist playbook. Think about it: housing affordability is difficult to solve and the cost of living is complex. Well, it is when your true constituency is not the voting public. Economic inequality demands ambitious, large-scale, structural reform and that’s not popular with corporate donors.
Whereas convincing people that a rainbow flag is the problem? That’s easy. In the middle of a loneliness crisis, it’s easy to distract voters by demonising the ‘other’, the person you don’t know or have a relationship with so that they never cotton on to the fact that you won’t deliver materially for them. You deliver for your big business mates.
Many people have never met a trans person so just feed AI-generated videos full of people claiming to have lost their job “because of pronouns” to those people who are already anxious that their kids are mad at them for getting their friend’s pronouns wrong (something you already don’t entirely understand and are frustrated by), and watch it do its work.
When governments refuse to offer solutions to the issues affecting people’s daily lives, culture wars provide a convenient distraction. Rather than asking why wages have stagnated, why public services are under pressure or why young people can’t afford a home, public attention is redirected towards symbolic battles over flags, books, drag performances and school policies.
Throughout history (and many of our lifetimes), we’ve seen migrants, religious minorities, First Nations peoples and refugees positioned as threats to national identity or ‘social cohesion’. Today, transgender people have been placed at the top of that list. A misunderstood community is presented as evidence of a society in decline, allowing far-right politicians to manufacture outrage.
Visibility has always been political for us. Pride emerged from generations of LGBTIQA+ people being criminalised, institutionalised, excluded from employment, denied healthcare and murdered. A Pride flag acknowledges that history and our enduring fight for equality.
Removing symbols and banning our events deliberately redefines who belongs. It’s arguing for DEI for white, heterosexual, cisgender Christians. It’s a wail for the privilege they think they’ve lost.
It’s no coincidence these attacks on Divine Playhouse are happening while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation soars in the polls. At her National Press Club address, Hanson delivered a tirade about bogeymen lurking in the shadows, ranting about ‘transgender insurgents’, spreading blatant disinformation about trans people, all with the nation’s eyes on her. This is the strategy: Manufacture a culture war so that the media and political class argue about whether or not someone is a transphobe, get ‘cancelled’ and become a martyr. The hysteria spreads, her poll numbers soar and she gets to sail towards elections without answering the uncomfortable questions about her ties to billionaires like Gina Rinehart – who would much rather pay Australians $2 a day – while she and Pauline lounge in Sicily, or about Pauline’s newest pal, the white supremacist Tommy Robinson.
What can you do?
Show up when our communities are targeted: attend events, march, write, create public art, whatever it takes to make noise. Give to organisations fighting the far-right, whether that is in time, services or funding. Only we can make change happen and that means you need to give what you can, as it’s now a matter of our collective survival. Challenge disinformation when you hear it. Silence is complicity and silence in the face of division normalises hate and fear. Bring joy! The far-right grows when people are lonely, poor and feel like they have no other option. Community is the antidote to the far-right but there is no amount of money the billionaires can throw at that as solidarity and joy can’t be manufactured or bought.
