According to the Human Rights Campaign, at least sixteen transgender people have been fatally shot or killed by other violent means in 2018, including one in Texas. In 2017, that number was 28.

According to the HRC statistics, LGBT youth are twice as likely to be physically assaulted, and 90 percent of LGBT youth say they hear or read negative messages about being LGBT–mostly at school, on the Internet, or from their own peers. A nine-year-old was bullied and pushed to suicide because he was gay. Anti-LGBT myths are, such as the claim that all LGBT people are sexual predators, are still prevalent today, with all of them being debunked and pronounced as false and unreasonable.

In my own experience, I had a friend say that if he were to find out that his wife was trans, he’d kill her with his own hands. A relative of mine called my fifth grade teacher a slur because she wouldn’t let me sit out for one class, and based it all off of how she dressed and talked. My twelve-year-old cousin said that he thought it was wrong to like boys and girls because his friends said that he couldn’t.

As I typed this up, I found myself getting more and more disturbed, but also it made me realize something: we normalize violence and discrimination towards LGBT people. People stereotype and demean them. It’s a problem, and not enough is being done about it as LGBT youth are three times as likely to contemplate suicide and five times as likely to have attempted suicide than heterosexual youth.

This has to change.

There’s also the strange concept of saying LGBT people and their demand to be respected and to be treated as fairly as anyone else is “special snowflake” rhetoric. Asking to be treated as a human being shouldn’t be earned, but rather expected. There is no reason to make anyone in the LGBT community feel less than accepted or to shun them and treat them as subhuman. With so many numbers that describe the suffering and pain of LGBT youth, there’s one thing we have to do in order to decrease those numbers: be a good person.

Be a good ally to LGBT people by being there to support them through thick and thin. Defend them against their oppressors. Don’t tolerate hate-fueled jokes or remarks toward them by spreading them or laughing along. Let them know that you’ll have a shoulder for them to lean on and let’s remove a little hate from the world.