LGBTQ+ Characters in Hollywood Films Hit a Three-Year Low — and There Wasn't a Single Trans Character

GLAAD released its annual accounting of LGBTQ+ representation in film last Thursday, July 9, and the numbers moved the wrong way for the third year running. Among the 225 films released in 2025 by the ten largest studio distributors, only 20.4% included any LGBTQ+ character — down from 23.6% in 2024 and a record high of 28.5% in 2023. The raw count is even starker: 112 LGBTQ+ characters, down from 181 the year before.

The single most damning line in the report is about who was missing entirely. Across all 225 of those major studio films, there was not one transgender character. Not a lead, not a supporting role, not a background figure with a line. Nineteen animated and family films contained no LGBTQ+ characters at all.

What the study is, and what changed

The report is GLAAD’s long-running Studio Responsibility Index, now rebranded as “Where We Are in Film” — the fourteenth year the organisation has tracked queer inclusion in theatrical releases. The rename signals a broader scope, but the core function is the same: count the characters, assess how they’re written, and hold the biggest distributors to account for the gap between their Pride-month marketing and their actual output.

That gap is the story. This is not a case of audiences rejecting queer film. GLAAD is careful to point out that several of the most inclusive titles of the year were critical and commercial successes. The decline is happening despite the box-office evidence that these stories work, which points away from “the market decided” and toward decisions made in development offices and greenlight meetings.

Why the numbers are falling

It is worth reasoning about the causes rather than just lamenting the total. A few forces are plausibly stacking up at once.

The first is a broad contraction in mid-budget adult filmmaking — exactly the tier where queer stories have historically found room. As studios concentrate resources on franchise tentpoles and animated family fare, the kinds of films most likely to feature a gay supporting character or a lesbian lead are the ones getting made less often. Notably, GLAAD found that mid-budget films and horror actually showed more consistent representation than many of the big studio projects, which fits this reading.

The second is the political climate. The study covers films released in 2025, a year in which the US political environment turned sharply hostile to LGBTQ+ visibility and especially to trans people. Studios are risk-averse by nature, and it is hard not to connect the total disappearance of transgender characters to a chill in which executives quietly decide that a trans storyline is a controversy they would rather not court. GLAAD’s own framing has repeatedly warned about exactly this kind of pre-emptive erasure.

The trans erasure deserves its own sentence

It is one thing for representation to slip a few percentage points. It is another for an entire category of people to vanish from 225 of the year’s biggest movies. Zero is not a rounding error; it is a signal. Transgender people are, at this moment, among the most talked-about groups in American political life — subjects of legislation, court cases, and constant public argument. To be that visible in the discourse and that invisible on screen is a specific kind of dehumanisation: talked about endlessly, depicted never.

Representation is not the whole battle, and no one at GLAAD claims it is. A trans teenager watching a movie will not have their healthcare restored by seeing a character like themselves. But visibility and rights have always moved together, in both directions. Stories are where a lot of people first encounter the idea that someone unlike them is fully human, and the withdrawal of those stories is not neutral.

Where the good news actually is

If the studio numbers are grim, it is worth remembering where queer storytelling is currently thriving: television and streaming, independent film, and international productions. This same month, Netflix is closing out Heartstopper with a feature finale, and festival circuits from Cannes to Fantasia have been programming queer work at a healthy clip. The mainstream Hollywood pipeline is contracting, but the broader ecosystem is not.

Still, the studios matter because their films reach the widest audiences and set the terms of what feels normal. GLAAD’s report is, at bottom, an argument that the companies with the most reach are using it the least. Third year in a row, and a trans character count of zero, is a hard argument to wave away.