There Is No Pride With Genocide

On June 28, 2025, as Pride flags unfurl across city squares and timelines flood with rainbow-filtered joy, it’s worth remembering: Pride began not as a party, but as a riot. The lived crucible of street fights, imprisonment, and censorship forged a lesson: liberation must be collective. There is no pride with genocide.

via Instagram @iscreamcolour | “Marsha P. Johnson: Gay liberation and AIDS activist."

In 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York, trans activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera sparked a revolt against police brutality and systemic erasure of the LGBTIQA+ communities. That act of resistance lit a fuse that transcended borders (and genders), seeding a global movement rooted in disobedience, survival, and the urgent demand for dignity. Today, amid parades and progress, that original fire still matters—especially when justice remains unevenly distributed and visibility is still a battleground.

What began as a response to policing and violence against diversity has, over decades, embraced wider inclusivity. Without trans* people, women, queer folks of color, sex workers, and so-called "queers," LGBTQIA+ advocacy would lack both depth and credibility. Today's movements draw from those lived experiences at the forefront of resistance.

Fifty-five years after Stonewall, milestones mark the path forward. Germany’s 2024 Self-Determination Act, for instance, scrapped court and medical requirements, letting adults—and minors with consent—change legal name and gender by declaration. Today's Berlin's Christopher Day's (CDS) parade is one of the most famous across Europe. In 2019, the World Health Organization removed transgender identities from the list of mental health disorders in its global diagnostic manual, pushing global depathologization. Countries like Germany, Malta, Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Chile now legally recognize non-binary identities with an “X” marker on official documents.

Via Instagram @hornet | Berlin CDS Parade 2018

Beyond legal wins, transfeminist movements and youth-led, autonomous collectives continue to resist the pressures of normalization and marketable pride. Because those who's identity is appealed by the pride of the rainbow flag the 28th of june, know that beneath the banner of progress, a deeper contradiction still endures: colonial power structures remain intact, and the struggle to decolonize queer liberation is far from over.

Across the globe, humanitarian crises continue to unfold—each one demanding a global solidarity that refuses to look away. In Gaza, Palestinians resist under siege amid unrelenting violence. In Sudan, the Masalit people face ethnic cleansing by the Rapid Support Forces. The Democratic Republic of Congo grapples with armed conflict driven by the exploitation of its lithium-rich lands. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain trapped in camps in Myanmar. In Nigeria, Atyap communities are forcibly displaced from Kaduna. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh endure renewed attacks, under conditions many describe as apartheid. And in Syria, Alawite civilians are subjected to targeted mass atrocities.

Even within Europe, repression persists. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government banned Budapest’s 30th Pride, criminalizing organizers and threatening participants with surveillance and fines—a move condemned by EU embassies and officials as an assault on democratic values.

Despite intensifying crackdowns, acts of resistance continue across the globe. In Europe, decolonial activists have been arrested for attending anti-genocidal protests all across. Not to mention those punished for attempting to deliver humanitarian aid—such as food, water, and medical supplies—to Gaza, in defiance of state-imposed restrictions and rising criminalization of solidarity efforts. Palestinian organizers in exile have sustained community networks abroad, creating mutual aid systems and cultural initiatives that preserve identity and amplify the call for justice from the diaspora.

Meanwhile, anticolonial coalitions are gaining ground in the Global South: movements in South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile have united Indigenous, Afro-descendant communities to challenge extractivism, militarization, and neocolonial power structures. Frontline civil defenders across these regions continue to risk their lives, facing intimidation, criminalization, and violence, yet remain committed to preserving life, land, and collective dignity in the face of systemic repression.

To call this a “silent revolution” misses the point completley: justice today is not silenced by indifference but by deliberate suppression. Visibility is punished, resistance surveilled, and solidarity treated as subversion.

In a world where suffering becomes spectacle, the simplest acts, the ongoing defense of queer existence serves as a defiance of the system. Those who persist—whether from positions of privilege or vulnerability—understand that speaking out may mean isolation, surveillance and even violence. Global power structures "watch, aim, and shoot," hoping to confine queer lives to mere targets. Yet refuse to obey.

Indeed, there is pride on those who don rainbow courage without expecting anything in return; whose very existence undermines oppressive systems. And in those who fight; pride on them. But as we've come up to date, we proudly gotta say: there is no Pride with genocide.