The irony of losing queer people to violence on the night before our community gathers to remember those we lost to violence is a bitter pill to swallow. But on Saturday, a shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club killed five people and injured 19. The shooter was tackled by patrons at the bar before any others could be added to the list of names read out this weekend.
The next logical step for the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ movement was always moving into deadly violence.
The anti-LGBTQ violence we saw this weekend has been inevitable for a while now, as conservative politicians have increasingly ramped up violent rhetoric against LGBTQ people and particularly trans people.
Over the last year or so, the language directed at drag shows and trans people has hit newly dangerous levels. In far-right circles, the word “groomer” has become a synonym for an LGBTQ person. Drag Queen Story Hour events, in which drag queens dramatically read books to children while wearing spangly outfits, have become a common gathering spot for right-wing groups to protest, sometimes showing up with guns.
In the last six months, a number of children’s hospitals that care for trans patients have received dozens of bomb and death threats. A New York City bar that hosts drag shows has been repeatedly vandalized while police appear to look away, and LGBTQ gathering spots elsewhere in the country have seen their windows broken and have also received death threats.
The next logical step for the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ movement was always moving into deadly violence. We’ve seen this before with the anti-abortion movement, which started out by politically opposing a specific form of health care, moved to in-person mass protests, then vandalism, and finally, mass violence directed at abortion providers.
I wrote about the correlation between the escalating historical violence of the anti-abortion movement and the ongoing climb in violence against LGBTQ people by the anti-trans movement here a few months ago. In August, I published a piece for Medium about how I was expecting someone to get killed as a result of the proliferation of extreme anti-trans rhetoric, and I hate that I was right just a few months later.
That the violence was completely foreseeable, if inevitable, and no one in power bothered to find a way to stem the moral panic against trans and queer lives, is a damning indictment of our political and media environments.
The conservative social media account Libs Of TikTok took to social media Sunday, the day after the shooting, to point its massive audience at a different Colorado drag show.
If anything, the mainstream media and today’s political campaigning about trans people helped ramp up the rhetoric. The conservative social media account Libs Of TikTok took to social media Sunday, the day after the shooting, to point its massive audience at a different Colorado drag show.
Those who consistently call out the escalating rhetoric are typically written off as “wokescolds.” But it turns out the wokescolds are the most aware of the social dynamics at play here, and easily foresaw where all of the violent language was headed. The shooting in Colorado wasn’t an isolated incident.
But what we really need is for the adults in the room to come to grips with their own discomfort with the idea of trans people, even when they’re kids. Being trans is not a “controversy,” there’s no “trans question,” there’s just trans people and how the rest of the world reacts to the existence of trans people. The violence will continue until we all decide that the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric needs to stop. Until then, we should expect to continue seeing a string of violent acts against trans people, LGBTQ gathering spots and children’s hospitals, just as we’ve seen decades of murder against abortion providers. I’d love to sit here and say enough is enough, now the violence must stop, but I know that’s not how this works. Too many people care more about hating trans people rather than keeping people alive and that’s just the world we live in. In a perfect world, there would be congressional investigations into anti-LGBTQ and gun violence and executive branch law enforcement action to perhaps prevent another shooting. But we don’t live in that world. Trans and queer people, we need to protect ourselves. Let us take the example of those bar patrons who tackled the gunman on Saturday. When the forces of hate come for us, we must always be ready to defend ourselves.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
