2024 is not turning out great for the LGBTQ plus community to say the absolute least. After decades of concrete and important gains, from 2009 when the Matthew Shepard Act made it illegal to commit a crime motivated by a person’s actual or perceived gender, to 2015 when the Supreme Court declared same sex marriage legal in all 50 states, things have been going downhill.

In the last few months, we’ve seen the Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida try to rid public schools of books that acknowledge LGBTQ realities. Missouri has passed laws limiting gender-affirming care. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has declared his intention to investigate trans children’s parents. And, of course, there’s the grand old fascist himself, Donald Trump, who recently declared that, if elected, he would nationalize Abbott’s efforts, thereby ensuring that millions of people around the country have their private lives become national business, and are subject to ignorance at best and large-scale violence at worst.

What’s fascinating, or, I mean, not really, because Trump isn’t especially known for keeping his stories consistent, but still, is that Trump used to be nominally at least this like ultra-watered-down sort of ally of the LGBTQ community. I mean, he congratulated Elton John on his wedding. That’s something. In 2016, he didn’t seem as devoted to a stance on the topic, stating that he was, quote, fine with it. And as recently as 2019, his spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway claimed that he approved of same sex marriage. There was even a Trump pride page on his 2020 campaign website.

My opinion? He’s cool with gay people, so long as they present an opportunity for positive PR. But he’s never actually cared about the gay community one way or the other. And so he just sort of swung from one camp to the other based mostly on who he was standing in front of. Basically, gay rights were never a hill he was planning to die on in either direction.

Until he saw how high that hill might be able to take him. How energized the far right was by anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. So what does Trump say now?

insert clip of him saying these people are sick and deranged from his June speech.

He even said the quiet part out loud. It’s amazing, he said, how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that, and he made a show of clapping weekly, but you mention transgender, everybody goes crazy. And now Trump’s campaign promises include a 10-point plan to protect children from left-wing general insanity. The campaign, in part, will declare gender as being a binary and immutable from birth. And the point of this is to end the very existence of transgender people in the eyes of the government.

The potential consequences are disturbingly obvious. We’ve already seen a sharp rise in hate crimes against gay and transgender people. And this is just the beginning.

It’s yet another case of a party that purports to be in support of the American family doing everything they can to force our children to grow up in an increasingly oppressive and yes, dangerous environment.