Is Pride on the decline?

Not so very long-ago Pride month saw events held in nearly every town and city across the United States and much of Europe, with rainbow colored flags visible in most streets and pride themed adverts on every television channel.

Pride was big business, and every major company was tripping over themselves to show their supposed support to the cause. Many altered logos to incorporate pride colors, others went as far as hosting events and celebrations.

More recently though many pride events planned for this year have been scrapped, often as part of a wider removal of any policies which might now be deemed to be part of the woke movement. Companies are scaling down or completely removing any sort of Pride campaigns, as well as quickly backtracking many DEI policies that may be interpreted as discriminatory.

This all begs the question of whether very many companies actually had any genuine opinion on Pride one way or the other, or like weather vanes are content to twist and turn with their stances to suit the current climate. Some in the United States will likely be cognizant of the potential threat to their operations from the government if they stray too close to perceived wokery. Others likely saw Pride as a superfluous use of their marketing budget they are glad to be rid of.

There have also been several high profile attempts by large companies to either broaden their appeal or ride the coattails of Pride based populism with marketing campaigns that then spectacularly failed.

Bud Light is perhaps the most prominent example, who used trans influencer Dillan Mulvaney in their advertisements for a short period, leading to widespread boycotts of their products and estimated losses of over $1 billion dollars. But they weren’t the only company to have been stung with a misjudged pivot away from their core values.

The Disney group have struggled financially recently for example, with some of this reasonably attributable to accusations from fans of political agendas being pushed in their products. That and it has to be said some truly dreadful output, with both series and movies tanking left and right for a mixture of the above reasons.

Some of the decline of Pride in terms of companies then might just be some of them coming to the realization that for most people, a company having a stance on a political topic is neither welcome or ever seen as anything other than disingenuous. A customer might just buy the product based on the quality of said product, and not based on the idea that a large faceless corporation has put up some flags for a few weeks each year.

Undoubtedly the appointment of Donald Trump as president has hastened the decline of Pride, with one of his main campaign pledges to remove woke and DEI policies from the United States wherever he finds them.

Pride, while not inherently linked to the sort of policies the government now abhors, is tangentially associated to hot topics such as biological males in female sports and spaces. Largely as a result of the ever-increasing number of sexual and gender identities now included under the LGBTQIA+ banner, many of whom may not be entirely happy with being thrown together into one not so homogenous group.

While most people support gay, lesbian and bisexual pride as a concept, the other colors on the rainbow flag are a lot less well understood or supported. The majority of the public for example would struggle to define terms like Intersex or Aromantic. Much less be willing to voice much by way of support for these particular groups.

Similarly, the levels of support for trans individuals in particular can best be described as precarious given the slew of high-profile contentious stories in the media over the last few years. What started as trans people wanting simply to be recognized quickly descended into a media circus fuelled by stories of biological male rapists sent to female prisons and mediocre male athletes transitioning and easily dominating female sports.

Even more controversial being biologically male individuals claiming they had a right to enter female locker rooms and toilets due to their self-identification as female. Or the transitioning of children, undergoing permanently life altering surgeries they often later come to regret, and certainly aren’t mature enough to give meaningful consent to.

There have even been well documented cases where lesbian women have been called derogatory terms for refusing to date or associate with trans women who have male genitals. A particularly bizarre development where circular thinking sees women who aren’t attracted to individuals with penises as bigots. (Surely not wanting to date individuals with penises is one of the core tenants of lesbianism?)

It should be said of course the majority of trans people aren’t the shambling obviously-man-in-a-dress monstrosities demanding people pretend they are biological women. But are in fact just trying to get on with their lives, and if they can pass as the gender they feel they identify as, even better. But those quietly going about their business are rarely also those who make the headlines.

As with most political ideas, the over saturation of an idea, in this case gender identity, will inevitably lead to an overcorrection in the other direction. Gender politics association with Pride has likely set the latter back by association, even as the pride movement itself begins to become more fractious.

Today the views of J K Rowling for example, author of the Harry Potter books and outspoken critic of trans rights impeding on those of women, are viewed as largely reasonable by a steadily growing majority. While a few years ago she was widely lambasted and the victim of numerous attempts to cancel and boycott her and remove her from the credits of her own creations. (Those attempts failed, of course, Harry Potter and her other works remain some of the most valuable intellectual property in the world.)

So given all of the above, is Pride really doomed to a continued decline or does it just need to be redefined?

At least for the remainder of Donald Trumps term it looks unlikely that Pride will be as big as it has been in recent years. But even past that its difficult not to imagine that many large companies will be more reticent in future given that they now know supporting pride isn’t in fact mandatory as it might have felt to them in the past.

As far as individuals and public opinion goes, Pride will likely still be roundly supported by most people; the days of outright intolerance towards non-heterosexual individuals are by and large in the rear-view mirror.

While there are various factions that are sometimes at odds with each other some of that support may be tenuous, and society as a whole still has some way to go in identifying and defining exactly where the boundaries of what they feel comfortable with are.