LGBTQ Community and Discrimination

The LGBTQ Community faces a lot of discrimination nowadays. They don’t get treated fairly and they go through a lot of things because of their gender. In 2019, you have to either be a boy or a girl because “only 2 genders are acceptable”. Many people only like lesbians because they enjoy seeing girl on girl action but when it comes to boys it’s “too gay” or they’re considered “fa*****”. I don’t understand why people can’t be what they want to be.

The same thing happens when it comes Tran’s women and men. They’re looked at differently, they’re not seen the same and to many people “they’re not welcomed or normal”. Many people try to use the bible to justify why they can’t be gay, or Trans and it’s sad. Even when people are born Trans it’s always something wrong with them.

I personally do not agree with any of this because I feel like nobody can judge anybody because nobody is perfect. It’s not our place to tell someone who they should be, or who they should like, or who they should identify themselves as. I totally accept people for who they are because if it makes them happy why should we tell them it’s not okay? Why should we be so quick to judge them from something they enjoy? It’s not okay and we should let people be happy. There is more to it than just gays, lesbians, Trans, etc. You also have bisexuals, queers, pansexuals, asexual, intersex, non-binary, etc. Many Men and Women clarify as one of these or many of these and many still don’t know if their one of these or not. It’s very hard and confusing for us to clearly understand what these mean and what they are exactly but that’s fine because we won’t always understand it.

Everyone is different and no one is the same so it’s better to work it out with them and understand them. When I first learned about all of that it interested me even more because I never knew there were so many different people around me. I used to think it was just the normal 3 everyone know of which is gay, lesbians and bisexuals. I’ve learned that everyone is different but it don’t make them bad people or any less of a human being than we are. I love gay people and a lot of people always wonder why I would like gay people and I never exactly just have an exact answer, I just do. It’s something about them that just make me happy and make me smile, maybe its seeing them happy and smile, maybe it’s the fact they ignore the hate, maybe it’s the fact a lot of gays make it in the fashion industry, music industry, maybe it’s because they still do what they love.

It’s probably because a lot of their fashion speaks loud, or a lot of what they do speak out loud, what they do it just empowering to be facing a lot in their lives on a daily basis. I want to be able to do something good for them when I get older and show them that they really do inspire me and that I really do enjoy the things they do. Still no matter how many people love them or how much good they do it will always be someone who try to tear them down and I pray one day that stops.

Today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth come out at younger ages, and public support for LGBT issues has dramatically increased, so why do LGBT youth continue to be at high risk for compromised mental health? In the period of only two decades, there has been dramatic emergence of public and scientific awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives and issues. This awareness can be traced to larger sociocultural shifts in understandings of sexual and gender identities, including the emergence of the “gay rights” movement in the 1970s and the advent of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s.

Yet the first public and research attention to young LGBTs focused explicitly on mental health. A small number of studies in the 1980s began to identify concerning rates of reported suicidal behavior among “gay” youth, and a US federal report on “gay youth suicide” (Gibson 1989) became controversial in both politics and research (Russell 2003). During the past two decades there have been not only dramatic shifts in public attitudes toward LGBT people and issues (Gallup 2015), but also an emergence of research from multiple and diverse fields that has created what is now a solid foundation of knowledge regarding mental health in LGBT youth. For example, that 43% of US adults agreed that “gay or lesbian relations between consenting adults should be legal” in 1977; by 2013 that number had grown to 66% (Gallup 2015).

The first country to recognize marriage between same-sex couples was the Netherlands in 2001; as of this writing, 22 countries recognize marriage for same-sex couples. Data from samples collected since 2000 show an average age of coming out at around 14 (D’Angelo et al. 2010), whereas a decade before, the average age of coming out was approximately 16 (Rosario et al. 1996, Savin-Williams 1998), and a study from the 1970s recorded coming out at an average age of 20 (Troiden 1979). Societal acceptance has provided the opportunity for youth to understand themselves in relation to the growing public visibility of LGBT people. The early adolescent years are characterized by heightened self- and peer regulation regarding (especially) gender and sexuality norms (Mulvey & Killen 2015, Pasco 2011). During adolescence, youth in general report stronger prejudicial attitudes and more frequent homophobic behavior at younger ages (Poteat & Anderson 2012). Young adolescents may be developmentally susceptible to social exclusion behavior and attitudes, whereas older youth are able to make more sophisticated evaluative judgments regarding human rights, fairness, and prejudice (e.g., Horn 2006, Nesdale 2001).

Therefore, today’s LGBT youth typically come out during a developmental period characterized by strong peer influence and opinion (Brechwald & Prinstein 2011, Steinberg & Monahan 2007) and are more likely to face peer victimization when they come out (D’Augelli et al. 2002, Pilkington & D’Augelli 1995). In sum, changes in societal acceptance of LGBT people have made coming out possible for contemporary youth, yet the age of coming out now intersects with the developmental period characterized by potentially intense interpersonal and social regulation of gender and sexuality, including homophobia. Given this social/historical context, and despite increasing social acceptance, mental health is a particularly important concern for LGBT youth.

Prior to the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” (Am. Psychiatr. Assoc. 1952). Pioneering studies on the prevalence of same-sex sexuality (Ford & Beach 1951; Kinsey et al. 1948, 1953) and psychological comparisons between heterosexual and gay men (Hooker 1957) fostered a change in attitudes from the psychological community and motivated the APA’s removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973 (although all conditions related to same-sex attraction were not removed until 1987).

Over the past 50 years, the psychological discourse regarding same-sex sexuality shifted from an understanding that homosexuality was intrinsically linked with poor mental health toward understanding the social determinants of LGBT mental health. Recent years have seen similar debates about the diagnoses related to gender identity that currently remain in the DSM (see sidebar Changes in Gender Identity Diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

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