There’s rarely a week, aside from when a new war breaks out, without an op-ed or news piece involving transgender-identifying people.

I counted no fewer than 25 stories on Fox News over a recent few week period involving trans people, while not a whisper about the Black unemployment rate hovering at a staggering 8%.

I’m not going to lie. I don’t fully grasp it all myself. I’m a child of the 1970s and 80s. Back then, we only knew gay and straight. L and G. I hadn’t heard of LGBTQIA2S+, and the last few letters were things I first learned about only recently.

Gay and straight weren’t hard to grasp when I was a teenager. Some people were clearly born with a natural attraction to the opposite gender, and others were clearly born with a natural interest in the same gender.

It never offended me. It never occurred to me that I needed to enforce Biblical injunctions on God’s behalf. I wasn’t going around stoning Sabbath violators or people engaging in premarital sex. I wasn’t trying to punish anyone for mixing linen and wool.

I knew several gay kids in high school and college and they were just as good or bad as the rest of us.

I simply didn’t care who someone loved as long as no one was being harmed. Like a child. Or someone without the ability to consent. Or in cases where a relationship could produce a child with severe health risks due to incest.

In recent years, people have identified in many different ways.

Here’s the current breakdown of LGBTQIA2S+ as I understand it.

L — Lesbian. Women who are romantically or sexually attracted to other women.
G — Gay. People, often men but used broadly, who are attracted to the same gender.
B — Bisexual. People attracted to more than one gender.
T — Transgender. People whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.
Q — Queer or Questioning. An umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities, or people exploring or unsure about their orientation or gender identity.
I — Intersex. People born with sex traits that don’t fit typical definitions of male or female bodies.
A — Asexual, Aromantic, or Agender. Experiencing little or no sexual attraction, little or no romantic attraction, or identifying as having no gender.
2S — Two-Spirit. A term used by a small number of Indigenous peoples in North America to describe diverse gender or spiritual roles.

Plus-All other identities not listed, such as Nonbinary, Pansexual, Genderfluid, Demisexual, and Bigender.

And with all of this visibility has come a loud, angry backlash. Much of it in the name of religion.

To be fair, we should be able to have compassionate conversations about whether it’s equitable for a naturally born male to compete against females in athletics. A naturally born male won the strongest woman competition in 2025. We should be able to talk about that calmly, without cruelty or dehumanization.

And we should be able to have caring conversations about whether 12-year-olds should be taking hormone-altering drugs. While rare, it has happened.

We should also be able to discuss, without bad intentions, what age is appropriate for any sex-related topics. These are conversations societies have always navigated.

But what we shouldn’t be doing is pouring endless energy into fighting human dignity.

We fixate on trans athletes in collegiate sports when, by recent counts, there are fewer than 10 out of more than 500,000 total athletes.

Meanwhile, we ignore enormous issues like homelessness, poverty, affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, our racially lopsided criminal justice system, and economic inequality.

Why aren’t we carrying out God’s so-called will when it comes to these issues?

It’s almost like we use this issue as a convenient distraction from confronting real injustices. It’s harmful to the LGBTQ+ communities and it’s harmful to every other community suffering injustices.

Every person who identifies in a certain way is still a human being. Whether we understand it, like it, or “agree” with it. They are someone’s child. Someone’s parent. A sibling. A coworker. A friend.

We don’t need to understand everything. But we should be willing to treat people with dignity, love and respect as long as they aren’t harming others. I can assure you that you won’t catch trans if you hug someone.

And let’s be crystal clear. LGBTQ+ communities aren’t causing the breakdown of the American family.

Child abuse. Spousal abuse. Divorce. Adultery. Poverty. The mass stress of racism. These are the things occurring at epidemic levels among good old-fashioned straight folks.

Those should be the things that get under our skin. The things that alarm us. The things that deserve our energy to fix.

Let’s make empathy great again.