The president has demanded that the National Endowment for the Arts denies grants to projects promoting ‘gender ideology’, leading to protest and legal action

“We now, as a community, have the ability to galvanise,” says Giselle Byrd, the first Black trans woman to lead a regional theatre company in the US. “This is injustice. We have fought this before and we will fight it again. We cannot let bigotry and hatred defeat us nor take over our stages or places of cultural worship.”

Byrd, 32, is executive director of The Theater Offensive, which presents art by, for and about queer and trans people of colour. It started in Boston in 1989 as an arts activism organisation responding to political failures around the HIV/Aids pandemic. It now finds itself on the frontline of Donald Trump’s culture war.