We LGBTQ People Are Often Not Counted When Counting Matters Most

Gender-critical activism and policing perpetuate violence against gay men and trans people. ⚣⚧

9 min read

Just now

When people read a headline like “a woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes UN report finds,” it lands with force. It’s meant to. That kind of statistic doesn’t just inform. It indicts. It says something is systemically wrong and that the world has been willing to count those deaths, name them, and present them as a crisis.

It’s reasonable, then, to ask whether a similar global figure exists for gay men or LGBTQI+ people more broadly. It feels like it should. After all, violence against queer people isn’t rare, isolated, or new. It’s woven into history, law, religion, and culture across continents.

But the truth is unsettling. There is no comparable global statistic. There is no UN headline that reads “a gay man is killed every X minutes.” And that absence says something important, not about safety, but about whose lives get measured and whose suffering is allowed to remain diffuse, fragmented, and easier to dismiss.

This isn’t about a lack of violence. It’s about a lack of counting. And behind that failure to count sits a social ecosystem that makes erasure feel reasonable. That ecosystem includes…