Florida’s 2025 legislative session wrapped up May 2 after 60 days of hearings and horse-trading, but the biggest story landed before the budget ink had even dried: every single anti-LGBTQ+ bill filed this year died in committee or on the calendar.
Equality Florida, in a jubilant post-session release, credited “people power” for the sweep: more than 400 citizen lobbyists filled the Capitol during the group’s largest-ever Pride at the Capitol week, racking over 325 face-to-face meetings with lawmakers and helping more than 16,000 Floridians send a flood of over 310,000 emails that legislators simply could not ignore.
Those numbers matter because Florida’s House and Senate sit under the largest Republican supermajority in state history — large enough, on paper, to override any gubernatorial veto. Yet four marquee culture-war proposals (the Pride Flag Ban, “Don’t Say Gay or Trans at Work,” the anti-DEI local-government ban, and the anti-DEI state-agency ban) all stalled, postponed, or quietly disappeared.
Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith told WUSF, “Once again, we’ve done what many thought was impossible.”
She cited that this year’s clean sweep improves on 2024, when 21 of 22 anti-LGBTQ+ measures were blocked.
Grass-roots momentum wasn’t confined to committee rooms.
Two days after the advocacy kick-off, hundreds of transgender Floridians and allies braved driving rain for the second annual Let Us Live march, streaming down Monroe Street to the Old Capitol steps to demand respect and safety for trans lives. Over 20 trans-led organizations fronted the rally, turning Tallahassee’s soggy sidewalks into a moving pride flag.
Numbers alone don’t win policy fights; showing up does. That lesson is especially urgent for young Floridians, many of whom tell pollsters that politics is something done to them rather than by them.
Worldwide, only 47.7% of 18-to-29-year-olds report voting in national elections, according to World Values Survey data. In the U.S., the pattern holds: the Census-based estimate for 18-to-24-year-olds in the 2020 presidential election was 48%, and fresh research from Tufts University’s CIRCLE project puts youth turnout in 2024 at 47%.
A UN-backed “Be Seen, Be Heard” poll helps explain the gap: 76% of people under 30 say politicians simply don’t listen.
Florida’s 2025 legislative session offers a counter-narrative.
Teenagers testified in packed committee rooms, college students joined email blasts, and young voters pounded the Capitol’s marble halls. Their presence didn’t just make noise; it reshaped outcomes in a chamber engineered to sideline them. If several hundred determined advocates can bottle up bigoted bills in a super-majority statehouse, imagine what a few hundred thousand could do at the ballot box.
Exhaustion is real, but so is the leverage of a ballot. The fight against 2025’s slate of hate proves that direct action bends policy, but voting finishes the job. Florida’s youth have already shown they can change the conversation.
Now they have to change the turnout numbers — because silence, not cynicism, is what truly lets bad ideas become law.
Learn more about Equality Florida’s 2025 Pride at the Capitol here.
Register to vote today here.
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