For LGBTQ people, the past couple of years, including the inauguration of Trump, has been reliving traumas of exclusion, bullying, and violence perpetrated on them by an increasingly aggressive mob of bigots.

Even Democrats have made insinuations that we’re an inconvenience to them now, and it’s felt by many of us that they will go the way of the UK Labour Party, and abandon us outright.

The terms “groomers” and “pedophiles” are commonplace, particularly on social media. My trans friends look almost gobsmacked, and in a haze, for the flood of hate that has come their way. Indeed, they are being scapegoated more than any other demographic in the U.S.

We’re not OK. So that bears a question: Is everyone else OK with this? The silence has been deafening. The truth is no one seems to be for “they/them” anymore, as one fascist ad from Trump implied. One party wants to scapegoat us, and the other treats us as a cudgel.

We are going back to where we were in the 1980s and 1990s: Social outcasts in a so-called democracy that would believe us to be better off dead than free from the violence that is lying in wait for us.

First they came for …

RICKY BENNETT
Astoria