And although it’s an uncomfortable reality to accept, we need to accept it. Queer and trans people are being murdered almost every day, around the world – that is not our past, it’s our present. And while it is important to remember those who were killed historically for their sexual orientation or gender, we must also remember that violence toward queer and trans people is not something that just happened “back then when society was less tolerant”. Upon entering be prepared to see half naked men in showers, more half naked men dancing on a bar, and one of the best drag shows. Starting today, it’s LGBTQ+ history month. What many see as the original gay bar in Louisville, The Connection has definitely served our community in more ways than one since opening. Many of the people included in this article haven’t been mentioned outside local and LGBTQ+ media at all. The coverage of these attacks and murders has been scarce – the Pulse shooting in Orlando, for example, was widely reported on, while the attack on La Madame in Mexico that happened just a month before was barely covered globally. I wish I knew of them because I met them someday, or heard about something they did in their lives, rather than because they were victims of attacks, some of them gone forever. And although I can’t find any official statistics for murder rates in the UK (these things are scarcely reported on and rarely collated), according to Stonewall attacks on LGBT people have increased by 80 per cent here over the past four years, with one in five LGBT people saying they’ve been verbally or physically attacked because of their gender identity or sexual orientation in the last 12 months.īut actually I really wish I wasn’t writing this – I wish I was talking about the lives of these people, rather than their deaths, or attacks that have happened to them. Worldwide there were over 270 reported murders of trans and gender non-conforming people in 2017 – the actual number is predicted to be much higher, partly due to misgendering on report documents relating to their deaths.Īlready this year two trans women, Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien and Viccky Gutierrez, have been murdered in the US. In 2017, according to the latest research from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence, there was an average of one hate violence-related homicide of an LGBT person in the US every six days. The Pulse nightclub shooting made the headlines, but many queer and trans people’s murders don’t. Particularly if you’re a person of colour.
That to be LGBTQ+ is not just about who you’re attracted to or what gender you identify with, but also about whether you’ll make it through the next day, and how you’ll make it through that day. After the wide coverage of Orlando in 2016 our community was grief-stricken – reminded, so publicly, that we are targets. I wish I could give space to every queer and transgender person who has been killed in the past year in this article, but sadly there are too many.