‘Ethical’ trauma is hurting LGBTQA+ community

It’s been a few years since I cleaned up broken glass from my front yard and found fires set in outrage that my household is LGBTQIA+. The hateful people moved away, and we are … safer. We speak freely of trauma these days – the traumas caused by physical and emotional abuse, by systemic injustices. We process, we recognize, we attempt to heal. Yet “ethical trauma” and its impact on LGBTQIA+ people are not often examined.

Ethical trauma occurs when your internal sense of right and wrong, your human sense of morality, is battered to the point that your sense of self and safety is deeply wounded.

The LGBTQIA+ community is currently inundated by targeted hostility. Our trans kids in many states are denied care. We hear about “Don’t say gay” legislation. We know our history is being edited out of schools.

We know people have the ability to be better, yet by choice they are seeking to harm us as individuals and as a community in the name of personal “rights.” The “right” to hate, the “right” to impose their beliefs on the bodies of others.

Their “right” is in conflict with our deeply held sense of human morality – that it is wrong to seek to harm others and right to seek to get along and respect and honor one another’s personhood. To communicate and to connect. To be human together.

This onslaught is targeted directly at the LGBTQIA+ community. Ethical injury becomes trauma, which feeds fear, shame, isolation, despair and the sense that one can never be simply “OK” as an LGBTQIA+ person. That you