What Happens Next for Queer People When Silence Is No Longer an Option

How we interrupt erasure and take responsibility together

12 min read

1 hour ago

In We LGBTQ People Are Often Not Counted When Counting Matters Most, we examined how the absence of data becomes a form of harm. In Where Counting Queer Lives Ends, Consequences Begin, we traced how that absence translates into vulnerability, violence, and policy failure. In How Queer Lives Were Written Out of History, we followed the laws and labels that trained institutions to misname us, ignore us, or treat our lives as conditional.

Today we turn to a harder question. Not what happened, but what we do now.

Erasure doesn’t persist on its own. It’s sustained. Sometimes deliberately. Often passively. Almost always through habits of thought and reflexes we inherit without examining. Those habits shape what we notice, what we dismiss, and what we consider normal.

They show up in familiar ways. When a missing Queer child is treated as a runaway instead of endangered. This was exemplified again in the case of transgender teenager Gwen Araujo. Her family reported her missing in 2002, but her disappearance wasn’t initially treated as a serious missing persons investigation because she was known to stay out overnight. Law enforcement only acted after receiving a…