your midwestern uncle

Thus is the defining characteristic of gay millennials: we straddle the pre-Glee and post-Glee worlds. We went to high school when faggot wasn't even considered an F-word, when being a lesbian meant boys just didn't want you, when being nonbinary wasn't even a remote option. We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it's never been easier to be same-sex parents. We're both lucky and jealous. As the state of gay evolved culturally and politically, we were old enough to see it and process it and not take it for granted--old enough to know what the world was like without it. Despite the success of Drag Race, the existence of lesbian Christmas rom-coms, and openly transgender Oscar nominees, we haven't moved on from the trauma of growing up in a culture that hates us. We don't move on from trauma, really. We can't really leave it in the past. It becomes a part of us, and we move forward with it.

For LGBTQ+ milennials, our pride is couched in painful memories of a culture repulsed and frightened by queerness. That makes us skittish. It makes us loud. It makes us fear that all this progress, all this tolerance [...] can vanish as quickly as it all appeared.

Violence Over a Transphobic Hoax Shows the Danger of Underestimating Anti-Trans Hate

slate.com|Evan Urquhart

On July 3, an anti-transgender protest outside a Los Angeles spa resulted in two stabbings—all over a social media post that police are now treating as a hoax. Back on June 24, a user called cubanangel posted a video on Instagram showing her and at least two other women confronting a staff member at Wi Spa on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown about having seen “a man with a penis” in the women’s changing area. “I’m recording this because I’m gonna make a big deal. I’m gonna take this very worldwide,” she explains, kicking off four minutes berating the staff member over the queer-friendly spa’s nondiscrimination policy.

Soon after the video began to go viral in transphobic corners of the internet, members of the trans community began to raise questions about it—chief among them why the video cuts out as the woman marches downstairs to confront this person she’s allegedly seen, conveniently ending before the trans woman she’s so angry about is shown. The woman also repeatedly mentions children being exposed to a penis, while no children appear on the video and the group don’t appear to have any children with them. These early doubts have been bolstered by reporting from the Los Angeles Blade that police suspect a hoax after failing to find witnesses who saw a trans woman at the spa, and that Wi Spa claims none of their trans clients had scheduled appointments that day.

To understand why this incident is so disturbing, it’s worth being clear about what the hoax is even claiming: that a trans woman used a changing room that she was fully allowed to use … on a day when no trans women actually happened to be using it. There was no specific claim of wrongdoing or inappropriate conduct on the part of this alleged person, although the colorful language used in the video certainly sparks the imagination, likely leading those with a transphobic cast of mind to fill the vacuum of facts with horrific acts of lewdness or indecency. Perhaps this is why outrage over the possibility that a trans woman may have changed her clothes in the appropriate facilities grew and grew, culminating in the protest outside Wi Spa, which included a contingent of violent extremists from the far right. The two stabbing victims were attacked by an anti-trans protester: One was a counterprotester; the other apparently a “friendly stab” incident where a fellow protester was hit by mistake.

Anti-trans activism is often thought of as a sideshow or a distraction, but these events show the real dangers of an increasingly extremist anti-trans backlash. In this case, an uncorroborated suggestion that a trans woman was using a women’s space ignited a protest that resulted in violence and led to a woman being hospitalized. That there was likely no trans woman there to begin with only underscores how thin a pretext is needed to prompt these sorts of outbursts from the far right. Trans people and our allies should not ignore the growing anti-trans sentiment in this country.