There’s one thing president Donald Trump has been consistent in since his re-election: cutting funding. The local LGBTQ+ community has not been immune. Since the beginning of 2025, the Trump Administration has significantly decreased financing for LGBTQ+ health research throughout the country, with over $800 million dollars worth of research into LGBTQ+ health scrapped, according to the New York Times.

Among those research studies is The Pride Study at Stanford University, a large-scale, long-term national study that aims to improve the health of LGBTQ+ people. Partnering with community voices, researchers aimed to understand how being a member of the LGBTQ+ community directly affects physical, social and mental health. For Dr. Mitchell Lunn, co-director of the Pride Study and a associate professor of Nephrology at Stanford, Trump’s funding cuts have already had a momentous impact on his work.

“With decreased budget, we will need to limit the number of analyses … that we conduct each year,” Lunn stated in an in email to Verde.

“We have made it our priority in this challenging time to protect the data that we have already collected since 2017, continue annual data collection through our annual questionnaires and topic-specific studies and continue conducting analyses and publishing scientific papers,” Lunn wrote.

Even as Trump’s legislation has harmed LGBTQ+ health initiatives and general wellbeing, America’s queer community is still adamant on pushing forward.

A Palo Alto High School student who is not being identified for safety concerns has taken Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ research personally. Nothing matters more to her as a transgender girl than feeling like she belongs, especially in these dangerous times.

“The main thing is just don’t treat us differently,” she said. “If someone goes to you and says [they’re] a trans girl [and] use ‘she/her’ pronouns, all you have to do is treat her like you would treat any girl. If a non-binary person walks up to you, just treat them how you would treat a basic human, because in essence, there is nothing different about us besides our experiences and a twinge of a change.”

This student is just one member of Paly’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community. For students like her, student-run associations like Paly’s Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA) provide much needed community-based sanctuaries for LGBTQ+ youth to converse and befriend other queer peers.

“Paly’s GSA provides a place to find community on campus and make wider change,” Paly junior and GSA president Colten Migliore stated in an email to Verde.

While Paly does have an inclusive community that houses members of the LGBTQ+  community, Migliore still believes there is discrimination.

“It’s common to hear homophobic and transphobic ‘jokes’ and even slurs, leading to isolation and negative mental health outcomes,” Migliore wrote.

With transgender research cuts on the horizon, Migliore emphasizes how this could further add fuel to the fire by negatively impacting members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“Trump’s wider attacks on transgender people add to this unsafe climate and embolden further discrimination at Paly,” Migliore said.

Migliore emphasized that allyship means being an upstander in the face of wrongdoing.

“Paly students can build a culture of inclusion by speaking up when they hear discrimination and even microaggressions, as long as they feel safe to do so,” Migliore said. “It’s certainly scary, but imagine how it feels for LGBTQ+ people to experience both political and personal attacks.”