Targets On Their Backs

When you are different people don’t like it, so much so that they kill you because you are not like them.

Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Paper Says
New York Times
By Andrew E. Kramer
April 1, 2017

MOSCOW — First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya.

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.
[…]
The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.

By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

But the government denied the claim because, get this…

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

Gee, that sounds like Trump new order to remove us from the census.

This is most disturbing in how they found the gay men,

According to the report, the authorities set to finding and arresting closeted gay men, partly by posing as men looking for dates on social networking sites.

In a totalitarian state you need a sacrificial lamb, someone or some group that the oppressed can focus their anger upon instead of on the state and what is better than gays, lesbians, bi, and trans people? You have a ready base of people who despise us that you just have to empower. You have a small minority that cannot defend themselves and are vulnerable to attack.

I hope that I am wrong, but all the signs are there. The laws allowing “religious people” to discriminate against us, the laws limiting where we can pee, and then there is this,

Census to leave LGBT questions off 2020 survey
The Hill
By Reid Wilson
March 29, 2017

The Census Bureau’s 2020 survey will not ask about respondents’ sexual orientation or gender identity, dashing LGBT rights groups’ hopes that the new questions would be added and raising concerns that the Trump administration may have squelched the proposal.

In a message to Congress sent Tuesday, the Census Bureau laid out the topics it plans to cover in the 2020 Census, when every American household will be asked to provide data about residents’ gender, race, ethnicity and other topics.

By law, the Census Bureau must inform Congress three years before the decennial survey about the topics it plans to cover. An initial draft published online Tuesday morning showed the agency planned to ask respondents about their sexual orientation and gender identity, among the 51 other categories of questions.

And we have been taken down from government website.

Why is it important for us to be counted? When we were trying to pass the gender identity/expression non-discrimination bill here in CT we were asked many times by legislators “How many trans people are in CT?” When we were trying to get trans people into homeless shelters of their gender identity we were asked how many homeless trans people are there in CT? And when we wanted to get grant to study AIDS in the trans population we were asked “How many trans people have AIDS?”

We didn’t have answers for them because nobody collects data on us.

If we are not counted or visible then we don’t exist.

We are being erased.