In the United States we enjoy an advantage as we resist Donald Trump (which not all societies do when they fight incoming autocrats): we are a nation with many centres of power. Cultural, financial and even political power are not solely concentrated in the White House.

On Tuesday, for instance, by using decades-old law about discrimination on the basis of sex, a federal court in Chicago ruled that companies cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, it’s been a wild, up-and-down few days for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans rights in America.

The ruling was limited, but it is to be celebrated. The Trump administration has been cruelly taunting LGBT people about their powerlessness – from floating the possibility that an LGBT-specific discriminatory executive order could be coming, to trying to undermine protections for transgender schoolchildren, to leaving the Office of National Aids Policy seemingly unstaffed and empty.

The court’s ruling, affirming gay people’s right to work, was a good reminder that our rights don’t just come from Trump. In an eight to three ruling, the court used the 1964 Civil Rights Act to say that a lawsuit by an Indiana woman, Kimberly Hively – who argued that she had not been hired for a job because she was a lesbian – could proceed. It’s important to note that the court did not rule on the merits of her claim, it just said her lawsuit could advance.

Still, the court’s ruling is a reminder that LGBT rights were not won quickly and can’t be dismissed quickly. History has informed our present and can’t be dismissed entirely, even if the current occupant of the Oval Office seems ignorant of it. The Civil Rights Act – won just a year after the openly gay organiser of the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, read its demands aloud for “comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress” – is bearing fruit some five decades later, in unexpected ways.

The court’s ruling is hopeful, but it’s also a cautionary tale that LGBT liberation (or any liberation) cannot be achieved through any one path. While they’re fighting us on many fronts, Trump, his anti-gay vice-president, and their anti-LGBT minions are conversely vulnerable because we can fight them on many fronts.

And just as we can never count on any one president to destroy us, we shouldn’t count on them to save us either. Even under President Obama, LGBT employment rights were tacit. In his second term, Obama signed an executive order to ban LGBT discrimination by federal contractors, something Trump was able to undo quickly.

LGBT advocates can’t count on Congress to save us, either. Even when he had a Democratic Congress, Obama never signed off a federal law banning LGBT discrimination, or passed an update to the Civil Rights Act to explicitly expand it to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

Counting on business won’t save queer people either. While the National Collegiate Athletic Association admirably pulled out of the state of North Carolina after it passed its draconian house bill 2 last year, which brought in restrictions on which public restroom transgender people could use, the association announced it would let games resume there after the state “repealed” that law. But the state did not really repeal all the hateful aspects of the law, and North Carolina is still criminalising trans bodies.

Not even counting on the courts alone will save us. While that bipartisan court in Chicago ruled well for LGBT rights, a different federal court in Atlanta ruled just a few weeks ago that the Civil Rights Act does not apply to sexual orientation, meaning federal law on this may need to be resolved at the supreme court. And how that may be resolved – especially as Trump will have a basically stolen seat on the supreme court after Obama’s nominee was denied a vote in his last year in office – is far from certain.

It can seem disheartening for some that the fight for LGBT rights is more complicated than achieving marriage equality and military service. It can sound pessimistic to say aloud that fighting for LGBT liberation must not let up under a relatively supportive president, such as Obama, and that these efforts need to be redoubled under a President Trump. But it’s good news, actually, to understand that work throughout history has already helped us, and to know that even as bigoted an administration as this one leaves many battles that can be won in the present.

Trump may issue executive orders, and legislatures may pass laws, and businesses will let us down. But none of them can fight everywhere. LGBT people can, and must, fight them on every front. Our lives depend upon it.