Pride Month
Pride Month — The Celebration and the Weight Are Not Contradictions
What actually happened
As of June 2026, 147 anti-LGBTQ bills have passed in state legislatures since 2021. Twenty-two states have enacted laws banning gender-affirming care for minors. Eleven states have laws restricting which bathrooms trans people may use. Six states have laws allowing child welfare agencies to refuse placement with LGBTQ families based on religious exemption. Four states have passed laws criminalizing drag performances in the presence of minors, using statutes originally written to regulate adult entertainment.
The Human Rights Campaign tracked 33 violent deaths of transgender and gender-nonconforming people in 2025 — the highest annual total since it began tracking in 2013. The true number is almost certainly higher, because misgendering in police reports and coroner records means many deaths are never counted. Of the 33 documented, 28 were Black women. Twenty-one were under 30.
The Trevor Project's 2026 survey of 45,000 LGBTQ+ youth found that 56 percent report wanting mental health care in the past year and being unable to access it. Forty-eight percent report being physically threatened or harmed because of their identity. Seventy-three percent report hearing slurs from classmates. Forty-one percent report hearing slurs from teachers.
The system at work is the accumulation of loss as policy outcome.
Grief is not an accident in this system. It is the intended product. When a state legislature passes a bathroom ban, it knows the predictable result: trans people will avoid public restrooms. That leads to urinary tract infections. That leads to dehydration. That leads to avoiding school, work, travel. That leads to social death before physical death. The legislative record includes testimony describing these outcomes. Lawmakers heard it and voted yes anyway.
When a hospital system denies gender-affirming care, it knows the predictable result: trans youth will attempt suicide at rates 52 percent higher than their peers. The medical literature has been clear since 2014. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued its policy statement in 2018. Lawmakers and hospital administrators have access to the same studies. They are not ignorant. They are choosing.
When a police department misgenders a homicide victim in its public report, it knows the predictable result: the victim's community will not see themselves reflected in official accounts. The next victim's family will hesitate to call police. The next crime will go unreported. The next death will be invisible.
The real-world harm is the refusal to name grief as structural.
The cultural script for Pride Month is joy. Rainbows. Parades. Corporate floats. Drag brunches. That joy is real and it is earned. It is also not the full story. The full story includes the people who cannot march because they are working two jobs. The people who will not march because the last time they went to a Pride event, a stranger called them a slur. The people who are not here to march because they died of neglect, violence, or despair.
Grief is not the opposite of joy. Grief is what joy costs when you have been paying attention. A body that has been threatened knows the difference between a celebration and a survival. A community that has buried its dead knows that a parade route and a funeral procession sometimes follow the same streets.
The pressure to perform only joy at Pride is a pressure to erase the evidence. If Pride is only celebration, then the state can claim its laws have not produced harm. If Pride is only resilience, then the media can publish stories about "overcoming adversity" without naming the people who did not overcome. If Pride is only love, then the system that legislates against that love is rendered invisible.
That is what the system wants. Visibility without accountability. Celebration without grief. Love without rage.
What carrying both means
Carrying both means attending the parade and visiting the memorial. It means dancing and remembering the people who cannot dance because a landlord evicted them for their identity, a doctor refused them care, a family member disowned them, a stranger killed them. It means holding the joy as real and holding the grief as real and refusing to collapse one into the other.
For survivors of anti-LGBTQ violence, Pride can be retraumatizing. The crowds. The noise. The proximity to strangers. That is not ingratitude. That is a body remembering what other bodies have done to it. Survivors are allowed to skip Pride. They are allowed to attend and leave early. They are allowed to weep in the middle of the parade route. That is not a failure of resilience. That is a body telling the truth.
For families who have lost a child to suicide after rejecting them for their identity, Pride is a mirror. They are allowed to grieve. They are allowed to regret. They are allowed to show up and say nothing. They are allowed to stay home. The community that demands accountability from the state must also make room for private grief that has no public performance.
The system wants you to choose joy or grief. Celebration or rage. Love or truth. That choice is false. The full range of a body that has been paying attention includes all of it. The state does not get to legislate which parts you are allowed to feel.
She doesn't chase trends. She channels truth.
