We Are Human Too!

Dear Future President,

LGBT rights are a major issue in the world today. I am bisexual and I have faced discrimination all throughout my life because of who I choose to love. Many of us are not treated as human, but more like freaks of nature and we are denied many of the basic human rights that everyone should be entitled to. I worry about growing up and not being able to marry who I want, or work at certain places because I differ from the rest of the world. I am not accepted in some aspects of school because many people don’t like to associate with “people like me”. Although I face these challenges in everyday life, I am not the only one. The problem of the LGBT community being judged every day for contrasting to what is considered the “norm” is a growing problem that we as a nation need to start coming together to solve.

Though the whole world does not discriminate against the LGBT community, majority of it does. Indeed this is a very systematic issue, “The criminalization of people based on their sexual orientation contravenes international and regional human rights treaties. Such systematic discrimination reinforces the disadvantages experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and can be used as justification for violence against them, whether on the street, at home, or in prison.” Says Amnesty International. This organization believes that LGBT rights are human rights and that all people should be able to enjoy their human rights, regardless of sexual orientation.

In many countries, homophobic and transphobic people take the laws against the LGBT community as permission to attack them both verbally and physically at events and at home. People get arrested for nothing more than accusations of “wrongful sexual orientation” or “wrongful gender identification” in many cases. Could you imagine being imprisoned simply because you have the desire to be with someone of your same sex? Or because you don’t identify the as the gender you were born as? Being bisexual, gay, transgender, etc. is not a choice you can make. It is just something that you are and it is time people stop suffering for being who they are.

According to the New York Times “L.G.B.T. people are twice as likely to be targeted as African-Americans, and the rate of hate crimes against them has surpassed that of crimes against Jews.’’ And there were over 100 million hate crimes against the LGBT community in America in 2014 according to an analysis of data collected by the FBI. Though there very well may be more because a majority of hate crimes are not reported out of fear. Fear of coming out to family and the rest of the world because they dread what could happen to them.

This epidemic is not something that can be solved by one person or even a group of people. This is something that we must all come together to defeat. We have to look within ourselves to find love for all. No matter the sexual orientation or gender association.