The Retaliation Against The LGBTQ+ Community Is The Pinnacle Of Cowardliness

Why are you so afraid?

Photo by Nikolas Gannon of Unsplash

For as long as many of us can remember, the Queer community has been fighting for the bare minimum when it comes to rights — the right to love in public, the right to marry the person of our choosing, and the overall right to exist without disturbance. However, the moment we found a semblance of recognition, it was stripped away in new, more damaging ways. As a lesbian, I hurt for my community and more specifically, my trans family. It doesn’t matter the differing perspectives when it comes to semantics (hormone therapy for children, gender affirming surgery for youth, etc), it’s the bigger picture as a whole. People believe the key to solving societal issues is to disenfranchise a community of people that are hardly at fault. A community of people that don’t hurt the world in the way the bigoted and narrow minded public tries to imply.

Now before I get too far down this rabbit hole, let’s look at a few statistics:

• LGBTQ+ people are more than twice as likely to be a victim of gun violence than their cisgender and straight peers
• Nearly 20% of hate crimes are motivated by sexual orientation and/or gender identity bias