It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it. This summer, Bill Maher cautioned that “there’s no room for boutique issues in an Armageddon election.” He volunteered to put his own pet cause — “legalized weed” — to one side if it would help the party win Ohio. “And you know me, I have seeds in my urine.” Apparently providing a person like me with health care and protecting me from violence and discrimination in the workplace were on the same order of magnitude as the right to roll a doober.

Nov. 8 is over, and legalized pot did very well, thank you. The future of L.G.B.T. rights is more tenuous.

This is not only because Donald J. Trump’s administration is filling up with people who oppose L.G.B.T. equality. It’s because the Democrats may now dismiss our urgent needs as unaffordable luxuries, and back off the fight. As a local Democratic official in Ohio put it in a memo to the Clinton campaign: “Look, I’m as progressive as anybody, O.K.? But people in the heartland thought the Democratic Party cared more about where someone else went to the restroom than whether they had a good-paying job.”

I was present in 2014 when President Obama signed an executive order expanding a ban on L.G.B.T. discrimination in the workplace, so close to the president that I could have thrown glitter into his graying hair if I’d taken the notion. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

That order could be one of the first things to go in January when President Trump “erases the Obama presidency” on Day 1 of his administration (in the words of Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser and Heritage Foundation fellow). Other issues on the chopping block could include the lifting of the ban on transgender military service and the Justice Department’s backing of trans students under Title IX.