It’s June and that means it’s Pride Month! It’s okay to be gay, all year round, but that’s especially true during June. Thus, I wish you a Happy Pride month, no matter whether you’re cis or trans, gay or pan, aro or ace, polyamorous or monogamous, whether you’re closeted or out in the open – I hope that you’re heard and accepted for who you are and for who you love.
Pride Month is a month of celebration for all the people that are still, to this day, not safe to live their life the way they want to.
It’s a month where people remember those that fought for queer rights… but it’s also a month that is used to protest for equality and more rights. There are not just parties or parades going on but also demonstrations and protests, after all, and they’re important.
This post is sort of my contribution to that this year. It’s been in the works for quite a while and I really wanted to get it out there. The overall tone is going to be quite negative and I’ll post content warnings before the different subjects start… but overall, this post will be about politics.
Our rights, our sexuality, our lives and our identity shouldn’t be a matter of politics – but we’re still here in 2023 and there are many countries that only recently started tolerating gay couples or gay marriage, as well as countries where queer people are hunted down and persecuted, often facing death if it gets out that they’re queer – like Qatar to name one extreme case.
In many first-world countries, though, members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community still face harassment, discrimination, violence and death despite reforms that allow people to live their lives the way they want to.
This is further incentivized by the fact that many conservative and alt-right hate groups rally the mob by spreading lies about groomers and molesters being part of the community – but “There’s no P in LGBT” has always been true. It’s been true in the 80s and true even now. But people still don’t get it.
While I will link some articles, just to add some weight to different things I’ll say, all of this is still my own opinion. This is not a post that tries to convince anyone, rather it’s more about spreading awareness and just adding my own two cents (in German, you’d say “I’ll add my own mustard” btw) based on my own experiences and cultural background.
If you’re completely opposed to the LGBTQIA2S+ community, their existence, rights, etc., I’d love it if you just gave it a read without starting a war in my comments. I’d love it if this post made it possible for you specifically to understand where I as a queer man with a migration background come from when I say I’m worried about current trends.
And also, this isn’t just about gay rights or trans rights but also about the destigmatization of LGBTQIA2S+ topics. I wanna share my thoughts on these topics, using my platform, based on resources accessible to me.
If you wanna invalidate that for whatever reason, fuck off.
Also, I don’t speak for “the community”, I only am a part of it. The LGBTQIA2S+ isn’t a monolith. I’m just Dan aka Magi, some person that runs this blog in their free time.
- What is Pride Month?
- Discrimination and Hate Crime Statistics
- Groomer Panic 2: Electric Boogaloo
- The Far-Right is Trending! – A Rennaissance to Hate Speech and Bigotry
- #Stolzmonat or #Proudmonth – Straight Bigots Hijacking Pride Month
- Burning Houses
- Summary
What is Pride Month?
In June 1969, a courageous group of civilians rose up to protest the violence and discrimination they faced after the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in New York City, where for six days LGBTQIA2S+ protestors and the police clashed – with the protestors bravely standing their ground.
This was later known as the Stonewall Uprising and sparked a civil rights movement for the liberation of the LGBTQIA+ community, changing the Nation forever.
Thus, during Pride Month, we honour this movement. As I previously mentioned, it’s about remembering and honouring the initial movement, it’s about fighting for the same rights that other people have, and it’s a reminder of the generational work we have to do to ensure that we do not lose this full promise of equity, dignity, protection and freedom that many in the past have fought so hard to attain.
That being the case, in the US where it all started, it seemingly is about to end. Unemployment, Poverty and Homelessness among LGBTQIA+ members are incredibly high, trans youths are denied health care and treatment, and the US have introduced over 520 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills already, in 2023, with over 220 bills specifically targeting transgender and non-binary people.
Here’s a mapping of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in the U.S., provided by the ACLU.
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the most aggressive states have been Florida, Tennessee, Texas and North Dakota, with them passing the most anti-LGBTQIA+ laws… but these aren’t the only offenders, of course.
Recently in May, the Arizona bill “SB1040” bans trans students and school personnel from using school restrooms that match their gender identity, and it allows people to sue the schools if they share a restroom or similar with a trans person.
In Ohio, “HB6” prohibits transgender students from participating in school sports, whereas “SB83” restricts diversity, equity and inclusion programs or trainings, entirely.
Something that I’ll get into later is the Groomer Panic – a moral panic where the Alt-Right and “concerned parents” are calling teachers and members of the LGBTQIA+ community “groomers” for teaching kids about the existence of gay people.
The “Don’t Say LGBTQ+ Law” that was passed last year silences educators, prohibiting any instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity.
By withholding information, you’re grooming children. It’s a form of indoctrination.
So, to sum this section up, we have a lot of work to do to ensure that our rights aren’t taken away and that our existence isn’t eradicated.
Being gay isn’t a choice, after all, and if we don’t act on this now and make use of our rights and voices, they’ll just silence our voices and take our rights away.
Once they take your rights, they’ll continue to take your lives.
Discrimination and Hate Crime Statistics
CW: Hate Crimes
It’s 2023, and studies have already shown that for individuals in Germany, Portugal and the UK harassment, discrimination and violence are more rampant among transgender people compared to cis-gendered queer individuals.
Starting this post off with a banger, just to set the tone a little.
Obviously, the year isn’t over, so I didn’t dive too deep into all the different statistics that are out so far but it appears that the trend of the last years still continues.
In 2022, Anti-LGBTQIA+ violence hit a decade-high in Europe. 2023 doesn’t seem much better so far. It’s worrying, to say the least. (Source: ILGA)
Frankly, you would think that a lot of societal issues we’re facing at the moment wouldn’t be as bad as they are… “in 2023”.
I just wanted to highlight how even in “progressive countries”, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, harassment and violence are still on the rise and a big issue. It doesn’t feel like it’s truly “okay to be gay”.
It has only been a bit over two years since a Lesbian couple was attacked by a bunch of guys on a bus in London for refusing to kiss in front of them… The header image for that article is incredibly graphic and contains lots of blood, so beware when clicking this link.
According to ACLED, far-right militias and militant social movements like the Proud Boys have ramped up their engagement in anti-LGBTQIA+ demonstrations by over three times this year compared to 2021. According to UCLA, LGBTQIA+ people are nine times more likely than non-LGBTQIA+ people to be victims of violent hate crimes.
The HRC Foundation also provides resources and reports on fatal violence against trans individuals and gender-non-conforming persons, every year. Here’s this year’s report.
Groomer Panic 2: Electric Boogaloo
CW: Child Abuse Statistics, Bigotry
There’s no LGB without the T. That’s why we still have to fight! It’s 2023, and people are still claiming that there’s a P in LGBTQIA2S+. They can’t read. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad.
There is a Groomer Panic going on and I was sort of under the impression that that has stopped at one point… or rather, it was never truly over but it at least wasn’t as big of an argument in the homophobic crowd. At one point, people just stopped being as vocal about it… I assume that’s because refugees were a bigger topic in the last decade.
On that note, here’s a study about whether or not children are more likely to be abused by gay people compared to straight people… and the answer is no.
In 269 cases, two offenders were identified as gay or lesbian, in 9 cases, an offender was not found, 74 cases were done by other children, and 82% of the cases (222/269) were allegedly committed by heterosexual partners of a close relative of the child… but then again, what is one study with only 269 cases in the grand scheme of things, right? I’m sure the gays are up to something.
On another note, here’s a lot of information in regard to child molestation and homosexuality. It goes into detail about a bunch of different times and cases where minorities were just accused of molesting children, raping women or doing other things.
It’s not exactly about protecting “the weak and vulnerable” when politicians bring up children but rather it’s about inciting “the strong” aka the men with guns to “do something about the problem”.
Children, Women and the Elderly are considered to be something that we need to protect.
And the ones that threaten these are those that aren’t like the Christian White Heterosexual Cis-Gendered Men… at least according to right-wing rhetoric. So, literally, everyone else.
Anita Bryant
CW: Anita Bryant, Bigotry, Conspiracy Theorists
Some people here may still remember Anita Bryant and all her statements, back in 1977.
Anita Bryant was sort of the reason why we have gay rights nowadays… by which I mean that the LGBTQIA+ community was never a monolith… but Anita Bryant became the common enemy that the community and movement really needed to get more rights by banding together against her.
Note: While I could talk more about Bryant… I won’t. My point is basically just that we’re falling for the same rhetoric again as back then. People don’t learn. If you, however, have the time and will to learn more about Anita Bryant, here is a video by the amazing channel ContraPoints where the first 20 minutes aren’t actually about Rowling but about Bryant.
That being the case, Bryant coined statements such as “homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit […] the youth of America”… which is a baseless statement that the masses just ate up.
That’s because you don’t need arguments or truths to win a war… you just need the masses’ emotions…
“They’re coming for our kids” is something you may have heard of in conspiracy theories, Pizza Gate, in particular. When you read up on that stuff, you notice that QAnon and Pizzagate-idiots don’t have any proof for their statements but they do have many followers because children are innocent creatures that we must protect since they can’t protect themselves.
By stirring up fear and anger like that, you gain believers incredibly fast. A common enemy is all you need to start a war, after all.
Alejandra Caraballo of the BKCIS stated in an article that it is an “attempt at the dehumanization and delegitimization” of queer people. By associating queer people with pedos, calls for violence and more extreme actions are inevitable. This is supposed to also portray them as “lesser” or as “evil”, giving rise to supremacy and extremist ideals.
It’s the oldest trick in the book. If you’re fighting something that is not human, nobody can argue against your actions, rights? This was even used in the early 20th century in Germany, as this article notes, but it still is incredibly effective.
The current Groomer Panic
CW: Transphobia, Homophobia, Politics, Matt Walsh
A lot of what I’ll say in this section will sound very familiar, so I’ll keep it a little shorter, btw, but in essence: It worked in the 80s, and it works today.
I’m not sure if this was the catalyst for the moral panic but in 2021, the “Wi Spa controversy” happened which then resulted in a lot of false accusations of grooming directed towards transgender people… which then sparked violence and deaths.
Nowadays, though, you need to actively villainize people in order to gain followers. Where Bryant used to go to TV and spread her rhetoric to the masses that way, nowadays people go to social media.
On TikTok, there’re channels like “Libs of TikTok” or “LoTT” for short who will often pick out the most extreme examples of what people have said and share it in a way that misrepresents anything they meant or actually have said.
There’s one example, for instance, where a child said that their mother would convince them to be queer if they’re not queer. It’s cleared up afterwards but LoTT and other alt-right pipeline channels took the clip out of context and started a hate tirade against a family… because that’s perfectly normal, civil and reasonable. They were doxed and stuff.
Noah Samsen made a video on the groomer panic, LoTT, Matt Walsh, and later goes into detail about Shea Ellis and this one clip and even talks to her directly about it, so I recommend checking that out!
In the end, the current groomer panic is the same stuff as the past groomer panic. What evidence is there that “the gays” are grooming children. What proof do these people have? In the video linked above, there’s a section about Matt Walsh just stating that “teachers grooming children” is a fact. No sources or anything.
Speaking of… Matt Walsh
CW: Matt Walsh, excusing child pregnancies, inciting violence, sexualizing a child
I’ll just insert this real quick as a little side note about Matt Walsh who is just an incredibly unpleasant human being that luckily graces our existence by contradicting himself a lot.
Matt Walsh is a self-proclaimed theocratic fascist that often calls the “woke” or “queer” “movements” groomers without any proof, just like LoTT, but at the same time is opposed to him being called a groomer… with proof… and he contradicts himself quite often.
Not giving sources for statements you make is something the alt-right and the far-right loves to do… if anyone else claims, however, that Matt Walsh is a pedo for saying that the problem isn’t “teen pregnancy” but rather “unwed pregnancy”… then they get upset.
MediaMatters did, a while ago, expose the sordid history of Matt Walsh’s Radio Host days – a big article showing clips from this show and essentially just highlighting Matt Walsh actively calling for violence publicly… and Matt Walsh defending teen marriages and pregnancies in a very creepy manner… Here’s a bit of a shorter version summarising some of the statements although quite “freely”.
So, this person is someone that defends children getting married (and pregnant) at an early age – and according to him, “13yos were expected to act like 23-year-olds” and “it always has worked” in the past…
You could argue that that means that he, at the time a 23-year-old that was old and mature enough to incite gun violence publicly, is mature enough to be held accountable for what he says and does… after all, 23 is his standard for maturity when defending children getting married. It always has worked after all.
On that note, Walsh also admitted to having sexual and/or violent urges towards children.
When “clearing up these claims”, Walsh rambled on for eight minutes in a fifteen-minute video about many instances that were irrelevant to him defending child pregnancies and him inciting violence publicly to completely try and create a false dichotomy of sorts.
He defends his claim about statements he made by saying that he was only 23 at the time and talking to barely any people… at the same time, however, he also incited violence at the time… and he still does that to this day, only more subtle…
And he never denied his thoughts on 12-17-year-olds being the most fertile “technically” – he just shrugged them off without further mention by talking about silly workplace pranks or him running for mayor.
If you shrug off one argument and defend that really well and you’ve previously put that argument on the same level as another argument, you can pretend to have also rebutted that other argument, even though you never did. It’s a logical fallacy.
Matt Walsh is a freak that saw a video of a child wanting to try dancing on a poll and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the kid is stripping or being taught to strip. Perfectly normal behaviour right there for him to sexualize a child.
Groomer Panic Summary
CW: Politics
Since I’ve been writing this post in many different sessions, adding paragraphs and removing sentences, I figured that it’d be important for me to add a little summary here before suddenly talking about a different topic.
The Groomer Panic is a moral panic that has been sparked in recent years by media outlets excessively reporting on trans issues in a negative way. In 2022, Fox News aired a total of 170 segments featuring discussions about transgender people, all within the span of three weeks.
The Alt-Right Media is spreading 80s rhetoric about trans and queer people that isn’t based on facts and logic but rather on hate and fear.
To incite violence they make use of the ambiguity of the term “groomer” which is used in the context of both “being raised to do something” and “being molested as a child”. Meanwhile, they themselves are grooming children by withholding information..
They make these accusations that can ruin lives but don’t have any proof whatsoever… at the same time, though, they demand proof about the same accusations being made towards them. It’s hypocrisy. They criticize the grooming of children but are looking away when the Church does it.
Instead of actually trying to work democratically for something, the alt-right is inciting violence and hate speech, perpetuating stereotypes about gay and black people, and the last few years have shown us how each time they did it, there have been people acting on it, going out there and killing people.
Speaking of… Do you know what is more likely to kill children and teens in America than anything else? It’s not drag shows. It’s guns.
The Far-Right is Trending! – A Rennaissance to Hate Speech and Bigotry
CW: German/European Politics, Neo-Nazis, Racism, Transphobia, Ableism
Many European countries are steadily heading in a worrying direction with far-right political parties gaining attraction and hate speech becoming fairly common in political speeches.
Not too long ago, Hans-Georg Maaßen (German CDU politician) talked in St. Gangloff about a lot of different things…
One specific part was about sex, for instance, and how there are only two sexes (according to him), and telling people something else “may only work in some places in Africa” that are “zurückgeblieben” (meaning “retarded”, “dimwitted” or other slurs for mentally challenged people, it’s an offensive term basically) “where you can still sell glass marbles to the people for lots of gold”. (Clip of the Speech | Full Speech without a Time Stamp in case you think it’s out of context)
In this clip, Maaßen is not only contributing to stereotypes about Africa and the people living there but he’s also confused about sex and gender. Gender is a construct. Sex is something biological. People can be assigned the wrong sex at birth. There are also people that don’t fit into one of two categories, like people born with both parts… but Maaßen would then argue that “it’s not supposed to be like that”, probably.
The reason why I bring up Maaßen’s racism and anti-queer rhetoric is that he’s part of the CDU, the Christian-Democratic Union in Germany… they present themselves as “the middle”… but they’re not. They steadily are moving towards the right and they steadily are tolerating racism, stereotypes, logical fallacies and populist rhetoric to pander to the bigots.
Meanwhile, the far-right is just using hate speech and they’re far more successful at it.
The “Middle” or the “Center” is getting closer and closer to the “Right” and it’s making the “Right” look less extreme. That’s a bad thing.
It’s not just Maaßen, either. As Michael Mayr (Twitter) also said, Christoph Palmer has been racist repeatedly. Friedrich Merz had quite a bit of controversy going on, back in January after calling refugees and other people “Paschas”, a word rooted in the Osmanic kingdom’s history… but it’s nowadays used in a derogative way for someone lazy who doesn’t work.
This is one of the biggest parties in Germany that is pandering to the far-right by using their dog whistles and their ideology to gain votes. A while ago, popular YouTuber “Rezo” made a video on this party, highlighting their incompetent and corrupt nature, which I’ll link over here.
At the same time, right-wing nationalism is getting more and more popular in all of Europe. Here’s a 2019 article on this exact issue, showcasing many parties’ rise to popularity, whereas this 2022 article goes further in-depth about Europe’s shift to the right.
This is important btw because of the fact that it’s not just about immigrants or queer rights… this is an issue that threatens democracy itself.
At the moment, a lot of these parties are being investigated – but what if eventually the organs of the state that investigate become far-right themselves? What will happen to free speech and our rights when the far-right takes over?
#Stolzmonat or #Proudmonth – Straight Bigots Hijacking Pride Month
It’s Pride month and as I already mentioned that this month is a lot about queer acceptance, queer rights and tolerance… but for years, there’s also been this sentiment among straight people that they also need a straight month or pride month for straight pride or whatever. It’s honestly bizarre.
The whole reason why Pride month is a thing is that it’s simply not safe for many people to live as who they are and to love who they love. It’s a month where we just inch a little closer to a world where we can live and let live, and love and let love. It’s a month where we still fight but also reminisce about those that fought before us.
And Straight Pride is basically just the status quo but worse. Nobody gets thrown out of their house, beaten up or killed for their sexuality if they are heterosexual. It’s weird how it only happens to those that are in the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s almost as if those are marginalized and as if those people still don’t have equality and rights in a lot of countries. Weird.
“Straight Pride” shows us two things about “the straights”: 1) They don’t understand the point of Pride Month or Pride in general. 2) They feel marginalized just because during on month, people care only a little bit less about them.
The fact that some people out there (and by no means all straights, just some very vocal ones that often happen to also vote for the far-right, who may or may not own guns… a vocal and not at all threatening group of people) are like this is worrying.
They see someone’s birthday party and want a piece of the cake as well solely because they feel entitled to do so. When asked if they have an invite to the metaphorical birthday party or if they know the person whose birthday it is, they step on the cake. They ruin it for others instead of just leaving them be. They didn’t want cake anyways, they just didn’t want others to have the cake. That’s what Straight Pride is.
This time around, though, it’s 2023 and the trend of “Stolzmonat” or “Proud Month” was born on… you guessed it… Twitter. Bigots are hijacking the queer acceptance month for their own rhetoric and hate speech.
There are lots of people with the German flag tweeting out Nazi dog whistles and other bullshit, like “Meine Ehre heißt Treue” which was the motto of the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party back in Nazi Germany. Other people are celebrating 888 followers which is Nazi code btw. Not all of the posts are like that, though. There are some people that just think it’s a meme or that are ignorant of anything they are advertising by taking part in this.
Other accounts are sharing “memes” comparing themselves to “chads” and perpetuating transphobic and homophobic stereotypes by calling queer people groomers, by painting a picture of “blue-haired crazed women” to portray feminists (which btw has been around since 2011, and I can’t believe they’re still doing this), and just by rambling into the void about things they’d wanna do with these people.
Proud Month or Stolzmonat is a movement that is there to hijack and stop Pride Month.
While people may compare it to previous attempts at “Straight Pride”, people are being increasingly hateful in this attempt specifically by spreading hate speech and nazi rhetoric and imagery on Twitter.
On top of that, the IB has been spamming flyers about this stuff at our university (as well as some others)… the IB being the “Identitäre Bewegung” which is essentially a Nazi movement that is quite radical and that is tiptoeing around the understaffed ministry for justice. Yay.
In times when hate crimes are incredibly common (article, although in German) and where the far-right is on the rise, you don’t want to see bigots and nationalists hijacking the one month where people are made aware of queer people’s fight for rights.
This is an attempt at silencing the voices of those that are marginalized by drowning them out with your own propaganda. It’s an attempt at spreading hate speech to drown out anyone queer.
This is bad.
Burning Houses
Imagine this situation: Your house is next to another house. The other house is on fire. Yours is totally fine. Despite being next to each other, there is no chance at all that your house would also catch on fire.
This situation is what we’re in at the moment. When people say “Black Lives Matter”, for instance, they don’t mean that white lives don’t matter… they just mean that black lives also matter and that’s something that is not said enough and that obviously isn’t shown enough.
When your neighbour’s house is on fire, you don’t put water on your own house. You put the water onto your neighbour’s house. You wanna put out the fire.
When people fight for equality for those that are marginalized, you don’t ask “what about white people and what about straight people?”, right?
When I talk about burning houses, I mean that right now, there are plenty of people out there fighting against people that just want the right to live as who they are.
Queer Rights are being politicized and attacked by people. Acceptance and Tolerance for gay marriage, for instance, has gone down in recent years (here’s one source but it’s German) – when we talk about acceptance for gay marriage, we mean by non-gay people.
Gay people obviously want gay marriage. They want the same rights as other people.
But there are people that are not happy about the fact that other people can also marry. It’s bizarre how you can get offended at something that doesn’t in any way stop you from living your own life. There are people that are upset at other people using gender-neutral language.
Those people then call those other people groomers, which is an incredibly damning accusation to make, especially without proof.
If those people don’t get their way, they go nuts and start beating up and killing the aforementioned “other people”.
Those “other people” are LGBTQIA2S+ individuals that are in no way infringing on people’s rights if they want the right to simply marry their partners.
And when it comes to systemic racism and hate crimes that happen to BIPoC people, we need to do something against the structures that are in place that enable systemic racism and hate crimes.
We need to band together and fight for our rights. We need to stop questioning why people are fighting for their rights and rather question why they don’t have those rights.
Heck, back in February, an article read “Only in Mississippi: White representatives vote to create a white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America“. This is Jim Crow shit. In late 2022, there was also this article about how 15% of Black Mississippi residents were permanently barred from voting. There are other articles outlining the effects of certain laws on the rights of Black American citizens.
We’ve seen it happen before and yet we’re only watching while it’s still happening.
Summary
Now, this post was quite long, so I kinda need to summarise things… but I suck at summaries. Either way, thanks for reading this much already (or for clicking on this article and skipping to the summary), you’re a legend! Also nearly done.
Generally speaking, the world is heading steadily in more and more extreme directions.
People nowadays are thinking in very binary terms. It’s always “us” versus “them”. It’s always “left” versus “right”… but the “right” isn’t a monolith and neither is the “left”.
The LGBTQIA+ community is not some organisation. No laws, membership fees or badges exist here. Rather, people just identify as part of something larger – much like how many people identify as a Liverpool fan or a metalhead, a lefty or someone conservative. We’re not a monolith. We’re different people.
TERFs exist in the LGBTQIA+ community… and there are also creeps, obviously, but you shouldn’t tar the whole community with the same brush as those… after all, there are plenty of creeps in the cis community, like Matt Walsh, for instance.
There are people out there that think that “MAPs” aka pedos should be part of the LGBTQIA+ community… but those people are wrong. Sexuality is based on who you like… not how old people are. Pedos are sick people and should go into treatment or jail.
That aside, we need to stop thinking of groups as monoliths. We need to stop thinking of people as enemies. We need to stop thinking in binary terms. We may all be human but we’re still all very individual, just like how every leaf on a tree is a leaf… but each leaf is different from another.
That’s something I personally stand for.
I like people, not sexes. I don’t care about people’s race, personally, and rather than pointing at differences, I enjoy celebrating them.
I have had wonderful conversations with people who have vastly different values from me and I think that should be the norm. I don’t think we should normalize this constant fighting and these hateful terms and the use of dog whistles.
Rather, we should normalize open language and communication. Lower the barriers of entry and enable others to share their opinions. Instead of trying to convince people, hear them out and ask them questions. There is no shame in changing your opinion or adapting values. In fact, it shows strength when you change. That goes for either side.
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook, but also media outlets like CNN, FoxNews, Buzzfeed, Huff Post, BBC and the Guardian, contribute to this type of thinking.
They polarise and point out differences. When people argue on Twitter, they point towards the Pronouns in the bio and the Blue Subscription as if that stands for something. They laugh at each other rather than actually listening.
And this isn’t even something new. Hitler did it in his speeches a lot. He dehumanized Jews, Sinti and Roma, as well as disabled, sickly, old, queer and trans people… he groomed his audience by always speaking of “we” and “them”. He actively tried to discredit anything his opponents said by talking about “Lügenpresse” (German for “Fake News”). He talked about making Germany great again.
Through all of this, he was able to lead the people into the atrocities committed during World War 2… but it’s the people that allowed it to happen.
Now, people like Trump also do this stuff but people are falling for it again.
Similarly, Libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh and Fox News are calling the LGBTQIA+ community “groomers”. Anita Bryant did the same in the past. We apparently don’t learn, do we?
Nowadays, we’re being groomed to think that we’re in “camps”. We’re buying into the same tactics Hitler used. We’re steadily heading in a worrying direction.
At the moment, transpeople are being dehumanized and criminalized in the US.
Once that step is done, transpeople will be persecuted and the state will look away. It will be another Reichsprogromnacht. And after that… it will be the same as the poem “First They Came” by Niemoller states.
At the end of the day, none of us have chosen to be born into this world and yet, everyone faults us queer people for existing the way we are. When we explain how we are and that we just want to exist in peace, people take offence to it.
So, in my honest and very idealistic opinion, we should think about how we want to be treated and then treat others the same way. We should love and let love, we should live and let live – and we still have to fight to continue to have our rights.
Happy Pride Month!
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
Indiecator 
This post is a powerful and heartfelt reminder of the ongoing struggles and triumphs of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Thank you for sharing your perspective and raising awareness about such important issues. Your voice is both courageous and inspiring!
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