We Are Not Your Targets

I am tired of LGBTQIA people being discussed as if our lives are a national argument—as if our right to exist safely is still awaiting a final vote.

We are not legislation. We are not a cultural controversy. We are not material for a campaign speech, a sermon, a podcast, or some coward’s social-media rant. We are human beings who go to work, pay taxes, care for our aging parents, argue with our spouses, worry about bills, walk our dogs, and try to get home alive.

Yet in America, simply being perceived as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer can still make someone a target.

The numbers are sickening. In 2024, law-enforcement agencies reported 11,679 hate-crime incidents involving 14,243 victims. Among victims of single-bias incidents, 17.2 percent were targeted because of sexual orientation and another 3.9 percent because of gender identity. Put plainly, more than one out of every five victims in that category was attacked because someone hated—or believed they had the right to punish—who that person loved or who that person was.

And those are only the cases that made it into the system.

Behind every statistic is a person who had to decide whether reporting the attack would make things worse. A teenager afraid that filing a police report would out him to his parents. A transgender woman wondering whether officers would mock her, misgender her, or call her by a name she had already buried. An immigrant who fears the authorities. A gay man who has spent his entire life learning when to lower his voice, loosen his wrist, change the way he walks, or remove his husband’s photograph from his desk.

That is the part numbers cannot capture: the constant calculation.

Is it safe to hold his hand here?

Should I tell this Uber driver where we are actually going?

Can I put a Pride sticker on my car?

Will correcting this stranger make him violent?

Can I be myself, or do I need to survive this room first?

Straight people rarely have to conduct a threat assessment before showing ordinary affection. They do not usually scan a parking lot before saying “I love you.” They do not rehearse a lie about who the person beside them is. But many of us learned early that authenticity can carry a price. Sometimes the price is humiliation. Sometimes it is a job, a family, or a home. Sometimes it is blood on the pavement.

The danger is especially brutal for transgender people, particularly Black transgender women. The Human Rights Campaign recorded 399 transgender and gender-nonconforming people killed in the United States between 2013 and November 2025. Of those victims, 70 percent were Black, nearly 60 percent were Black transgender women, and 71 percent of the cases involved guns. HRC also warns that the true number is likely higher because victims are sometimes misgendered, deadnamed, or never correctly identified.

Read those numbers again and try not to look away.

These were not abstract “transgender cases.” They were daughters, sisters, brothers, partners, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. They had grocery lists. They had favorite songs. They left laundry unfinished. Someone was waiting for them to come home.

They never did.

Hate crimes do not begin with a fist, a knife, or a gun. They begin with permission.

Permission is created every time a public figure portrays LGBTQIA people as predators, contaminants, frauds, or threats to children. It is created when religious belief is twisted into a license for cruelty. It is created when lawmakers spend their days obsessing over transgender bodies while ignoring the hunger, homelessness, gun violence, and lack of healthcare hurting actual children. It is created when comedians reduce gay people to punch lines and when families dismiss slurs as “just words.”

Words are not harmless when they teach people whom to hate.

No, every person who says something hateful will not commit a hate crime. But every hate crime grows in soil fertilized by dehumanization. Before people can be attacked without remorse, they must first be described as less deserving of dignity. Before their deaths can be dismissed, their lives must be presented as disposable.

That is why silence is not neutrality.

If someone tells an anti-gay joke and you laugh because confronting him would be awkward, you have helped make the room safer for the bigot and more dangerous for the gay person sitting quietly nearby. If a politician calls transgender people a threat and you excuse it as ordinary politics, you have helped turn a vulnerable minority into electoral ammunition. If your church teaches love on Sunday but treats an LGBTQIA child as a family disgrace on Monday, that is not faith. That is cruelty wearing its best clothes.

We should be furious.

We should be furious that people are assaulted for holding hands. Furious that transgender Americans are forced to beg the government, the media, and sometimes their own families to use their names even after death. Furious that queer children still learn shame before they learn algebra. Furious that some Americans celebrate “freedom” while trying to make freedom conditional upon heterosexuality and conformity.

I am not asking anyone to understand every letter in LGBTQIA. I am not asking anyone to abandon a religion, change a personal belief, or march in a parade.

I am demanding something much more basic: Keep your hatred away from our bodies.

You do not have to understand someone to recognize that their life has value. You do not need to approve of a marriage to know the people in it should not be beaten. You do not need to understand gender dysphoria to know that a transgender person deserves to walk home without being hunted.

Our lives are not invitations to violence. Our visibility is not aggression. Our pride is not a threat.

We are here because generations before us survived closets, police raids, family rejection, religious condemnation, employment discrimination, an epidemic that governments were willing to ignore, and violence that too often went unanswered. We carry their courage, but we should not have to inherit their fear.

Enough memorials. Enough candlelight vigils. Enough photographs of smiling people whose names become hashtags only after someone murders them.

We do not want to be mourned beautifully.

We want to live—openly, ordinarily, stubbornly—and come home alive.