On November 20, as we do every year, our community mourned the hundreds of trans lives lost on the Transgender Day of Remembrance. 47 people were lost to violence this year, one of the highest on record. Around the globe, over 350 trans people were killed in 2020, disproportionately Black and brown trans women. These statistics are part of a larger pattern of homophobic and transphobic violence that continues to terrorize the LGBTQ+ community, one that must end in order for LGBTQ+ people to live meaningful, fulfilling, and long lives.
These outcomes speak to how beyond the individual, violence also destroys community.
Historically, queer and trans lives have not been viewed as morally equal compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. In the 1950s and 1960s, even in the most progressive cities, police frequently raided gay and lesbian bars, patrolled queer neighborhoods, and arrested queer people for everything ranging from consensual sex to dancing with a same-sex partner. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept across the country in the 1980s, the Reagan Administration’s press secretary joked it was the “gay plague” and the president failed to take actions to research treatments, visit patients, or even say the word “AIDS” publicly until after 12,000 lives had already been lost. Today, when police investigate and report on murders of transgender people, three-quarters use deadnames or misgender victims in official reports, disrespecting trans lives even in death.
Outside of the state, homophobic and transphobic civilians have also worked to create hostile spaces to gay and trans people, from lobbying to ban television shows with gay characters to hateful vigilante violence. This historical pattern of violence, ignorance, and negligence have created hostile environments for LGBTQ+ people, denying us the human dignity we are all entitled to as human beings.
Beyond individual acts of violence, institutions bear immense culpability for these disparities. Unequal treatment through laws including Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, anti-sodomy legislation, and the gay panic defense systemically undervalue LGBTQ+ lives, enabling discrimination and violence by either affirmatively calling for it or refusing to intervene to stop it. The continued conflation of being gay or trans as mental illnesses – including by members of Washington University’s faculty – is ignorant at best and negligent at worst.
Consequently, LGBTQ+ people face vastly disparate outcomes, experiencing disproportionate rates of houselessness, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, bullying, harassment, and police violence and are victimized by housing, employment, and educational discrimination. These outcomes speak to how the impacts of LGBTQ+ discrimination go beyond just the individual; this violence also destroys communities. Police raids targeting gay and lesbian bars disrupt safe spaces for queer people to socialize, dance, and find sexual and romantic partners. Reagan’s inaction surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis wiped out a generation of queer elders, preventing them from passing on their organizing strategies, historical knowledge, or stories of resistance. Higher rates of poverty, sexual violence, and houselessness force LGBTQ+ people to focus on meeting immediate needs for sustenance, distracting from the creation of gender and identity affirming spaces.
We deserve a future where all queer and trans people can live long, meaningful lives, filled with dignity and love.
This loss of community is devastating for people who are often already subject to losing loved ones because of who they are. Harrowing accounts of children disowned by their parents, or students bullied by their peers for coming out, speak to the ways that homophobia and transphobia motivate the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people from wider acceptance. This loss of connection is one of the most devastating types of loss there is: when we are unable to build strong communities, we lose our tether to the world around us and our attachment to our identities.
But LGBTQ+ people are not passive victims: Our history is one of resistance and community building in the face of adversity. From the Stonewall riots to mutual aid networks to LGBTQ+ TikTok communities, queer people have been able to receive direct financial and medical support, fight institutional homophobia and transphobia, and find role models who look and love like them. This resistance has connected LGBTQ+ people, and has created spaces for healing and processing trauma. Chosen families, bound by “love, friendship, and shared differences,” have become a cornerstone of LGBTQ+ support networks when biological families can’t offer the support people need. More LGBTQ+ people training to become doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists, and psychologists is also diversifying existing medical institutions to offer more supportive treatments, providing identity-affirming care in the pursuit of wellness within our community.
In the years ahead, we must carry on the work of creating systems that are inclusive, invest in community-based support systems, and fight repressive cultural and political negligence responsible for continued violence. It is our responsibility to change a world where LGBTQ+ people have for generations been denied the right to live freely. We deserve a future where all queer and trans people can live long, meaningful lives, filled with dignity and love.