America is renormalizing violence against queer people

When I was in high school, a kid named Matthew Shepard was murdered, beaten ,and left tied to a fence in Wyoming because he was gay. I grew up in a culture that did not feel very far away from that world at all, both culturally and geographically. Northwest New Mexico and Wyoming had a lot in common.

I was out very young, never ever in the closet.

One of my most searing memories in high school was my geometry teacher pulling me aside after class one day. Very quietly, he simply said I needed to protect myself and be careful not to “end up like Matthew Shepard.”

He was very sincere and meant it in the kindest way. The assumption that this was a thing that could happen to someone like me. That violence existed somewhere on the horizon already and that managing my visibility correctly might help me avoid it. My dad had already taught me how to fight, realizing I would need to be able to defend myself, but if faced with a group who wanted me dead, I wouldn’t fare so well. After high school, I left home as soon as I could afford to make enough money to move to NYC, skipping college altogether. It’s unimaginable to me that kids in the LGBTQ+ community go to school today with that same fear I lived with for so many dreadful years.

With blood on their hands, American politicians are still cramming anti-LGBTQ+ legislation through the system at an unprecedented pace. People are being attacked. People are being killed. And for what? Cheap political points with an out-of-control evangelical base?

A 19-year-old transgender student at the University of Washington, Juniper Blessing, was stabbed to death this spring. Another devastated family was suddenly forced into public grief while strangers online debated whether their child’s existence itself had been political.

At the same time, lawmakers in Ohio pushed forward restrictions on Medicaid coverage for transgender people, inserting the state directly into the machinery of health care access while delivering carefully rehearsed speeches about “protecting children” and “fiscal responsibility.”

A transgender teenager in Colorado forced to miss a school trip because adults decided her existence represented some kind of legal liability. Bree Fram stepping away from a congressional campaign after months of escalating harassment surrounding trans public life. Renee Good, a lesbian mother, shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis while her family continues demanding accountability from the same government insisting none of this hostility is real. A 74-year-old transgender elder killed in a hit-and-run after an argument in San Francisco. Another transgender woman killed in Virginia. Another in New York. Another in Illinois. A Florida man charged with beating a five-year-old boy “for being gay.” Kansas lawmakers advancing legislation that effectively places a civil bounty on transgender bathroom use. Schools being pressured to forcibly out transgender students to parents regardless of safety. Pride celebrations canceled because organizers no longer trust the country around them enough to keep people alive. Libraries requiring police presence because someone is reading books in drag. Hospitals receiving bomb threats for providing gender-affirming care. Churches threatened with arson for hanging rainbow flags.

What are queer kids supposed to absorb from any of this? What are straight kids supposed to absorb from any of this? What are any of us supposed to absorb from all of this? What are we supposed to think while watching people debate whether our lives deserve legal recognition at all while the people threatening us continue receiving microphones, promotions, television contracts, campaign funding, and state protection?

Lawmakers introducing bill after bill after bill targeting transgender health care, transgender students, transgender athletes, transgender teachers, transgender military service members, transgender bathroom access, transgender legal recognition, transgender visibility itself, while insisting none of this constitutes discrimination. Governors smiling through signing ceremonies while children are used as political scenery. School boards collapsing into screaming matches over pronouns while armed protesters gather outside libraries because someone scheduled a drag story hour. Entire media ecosystems spending years describing queer people as predators, corrupters, threats to civilization, threats to Christianity, threats to children, threats to the nation itself, and then acting bewildered every single time somebody finally decides to convert the rhetoric into actual bloodshed.

And the country has become so saturated with it that almost nothing shocks anyone anymore.

Bomb threats against hospitals. Bomb threats against children’s hospitals. Bomb threats against Pride events. Teachers losing jobs. Librarians harassed out of communities. Parents investigated. Health care providers stalked. Queer creators describing social media platforms less as public squares than permanent surveillance systems where harassment campaigns, doxxing, algorithmic suppression, death threats, and coordinated reporting attacks have become indistinguishable from ordinary participation online. TikTok influencers openly fantasizing about eradication while selling supplements and protein powder between rants about “degeneracy.” Podcasters joking about civil war scenarios like they’re discussing fantasy football. Politicians treating queer existence like a recurring campaign prop rolled out every election cycle to animate the same machinery of fear.

The legislation is violence. The propaganda is violence. The algorithm is violence. The hearings are violence. The jokes are violence. The constant framing of queer people as contamination, danger, instability, corruption, social collapse, moral infection, demographic threat, ideological poison. It’s all violence.

Eventually somebody hears all of it and decides they are participating in a moral act. Eventually somebody decides they are protecting society. Eventually somebody decides violence has already been authorized socially long before it is carried out physically.

According to FBI hate crime data, incidents motivated by sexual orientation and gender identity bias have risen significantly over the past decade, with anti-LGBTQ+ crimes remaining among the most consistently reported hate crime categories in the United States.

Organizations like GLAAD tracked more than 930 anti-LGBTQ incidents between May 2024 and April 2025 alone, including assaults, bomb threats, arsons, vandalism, and killings. More than half targeted transgender and gender non-conforming people specifically.

At the same time, the federal government is beginning to absorb parts of that rhetoric directly into its own security framework.

Under the second Trump administration, agencies have increasingly prioritized monitoring what officials and allied conservative organizations describe as “radical pro-transgender ideology” or “violent secular political groups,” language heavily influenced by lobbying efforts connected to the Heritage Foundation and affiliated organizations pushing for the creation of a category called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE.

And once again, this administration is declaring open season on transgender people.

We lost Jason Collins this week. The first openly gay player in NBA history. When Collins came out in 2013, he explained that he wore jersey number 98 in honor of Matthew Shepard, the kid in Wyoming tortured and murdered in 1998.

And suddenly the distance between then and now does not feel very far at all. An entire generation of queer people grew up believing America was slowly moving away from this kind of hatred. And now another generation is growing up watching politicians debate whether their existence should be legal in the first place while bomb threats, hate crimes, public harassment, and state-sponsored targeting become realities once again.

So, what are they supposed to do? Keep your head down? Be careful not to end up like Matthew Shepard? That should horrify every single person in America.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness @thedeadbetties

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