LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back! I will not kneel …
nor will I grovel for rights I already own.
Your game is old: label us as outcasts, designate our existence as obscene to make us criminals, and then call it “protection.” Protect the children while you weaponize them against us.
You twist my existence into pornography, then scream about morality. You label anyone who loves us, supports us, or even sees us as predators.
I will not grovel for your approval. My rights are not yours to grant. You do not own my dignity.
You want me gone, don’t you? Not dead.. no, that’s too honest. You want me as a ghost, unseen and unheard. You want to keep me from the spaces where life happens: schools, workplaces, bathrooms, public spaces. You want me invisible. But only until you need a scapegoat or an object for your perversions.
No.
I will not disappear.
I will not kneel.
You say you’re protecting (the right kind of) women. Protecting (the right kind of) children. Protecting society. But what you mean is that you’re protecting yourselves from me. From the reality that I exist, that I live, that I thrive.
You use bathrooms and sports as weapons, to teach hate, but this is not where it ends. It never is. You’ll come for the trans teacher, ripping her from her classroom because she dared to teach with dignity. You’ll come for the trans soldier, barring them from service because they refused to fit your binary. You’ll come for trans employees, trans parents, trans children, until there’s nowhere left for us to go.
And when that isn’t enough, you’ll turn on those who stand beside us. You’ll call them predators for loving us. Groomers for defending us. Criminals for seeing us. This is your endgame: a world where we are exiled, not just from public life but from humanity itself.
I will not disappear.
I will not bow down.
I will wear my dress. I will use the bathroom. I will teach the children you’re trying to keep in ignorance. I will serve a world that refuses to serve me back.
I will not kneel.
You call us angry. You call us hysterical. You call us radical. And yes — yes, I am all those things. I am angry because you are trying to erase me. I cry because you make survival feel like rebellion. I am radical because I demand a world that lets me live.
Do you know why you fear me?
It’s not because I am dangerous.
It’s because I am free.
You fear the teacher who refuses to hide herself from her students. You fear the soldier who stands in defiance of your orders of destruction. You fear the parent who supports their child’s freedom instead of crushing it. You fear us because we refuse to be silenced.
Your laws are not about protection. They are about control. They are about caging us, stripping us of dignity, reducing us to objects you can demonize or fetishize depending on your mood.
You will not break me.
I am her. A woman who will not kneel.
I stand with the teacher who refuses to leave her classroom. I stand with the soldier who refuses to leave their post. I stand with the parents who love their children. I stand with the children who refuse to grow up ashamed of who they are.
I stand because I am not afraid of you.
I will wear my dress, no matter how many laws you write against it. I will walk into your bathroom, no matter how many handcuffs you threaten me with. I will laugh, cry, scream, and celebrate in the streets you wish to take from me.
You will not erase me.
You will not erase us.
We are here.
We will not bow.
And we will never, ever go back.
