Story time!

My husband experienced a group of teenagers being extremely homophobic earlier today, which prompted us to reach out to our (small town) community and see if there were any LGBTQ groups we could join to help raise awareness and keep our LGBTQ youth safe.
1/?

2/? And this was the response I got from someone claiming that they work with trans youth in the community. I’m baffled at why there’s so much bystander mentality and enabling bad behaviour.
It’s frustrating and so incredibly damaging to have this kind of mentality

3/? The ONLY LGBTQ community group I could find online for our tiny town has all of 31 members and the group is so incredibly private that you can’t even FIND it when you search up key words, you need an elite invitation to join, you can’t even send the group link to anyone

4/ so it becomes such a hidden online group, that it’s not giving this town’s LGBTQ folks ANY visibility, we’re all here hiding in the shadows, some are forced to stay in the closet out of fear of rejection from this entire towns mob mentality that mixes with religion.

5/? It’s not to say that every religious person is a homophobe, it’s that this town however, has a religious cult that believes and promotes conversion “therapy” , believes being LGBTQ is a “choice”, and often says “I respect LGBTQ people but don’t agree with the lifestyle”