It’s the old Lone Ranger joke for the millionth time – “Who’s ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” Charles Blow at the Times says “we” a lot but there is no such “we.”

As the L.G.B.T.Q. community celebrates Pride Month, we are besieged by a malicious, coordinated legislative attack.

But there is no such community, at least not without some cautions and stipulations. It’s a very lumpy unwieldy community if it is a community. What unites lesbians and trans women exactly? Especially, what unites them in an environment where all the solidarity is for the trans women and none of it is for the lesbians unless they pretend men can be lesbians every bit as much as women can?

There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.

But most of the bills are about trans issues, not LGB ones.

In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.

Like that. That’s not an anti-LGBT law. It’s not even an anti-T law, properly considered, but even if you agree it’s anti-T that doesn’t make it anti-LGB. But of course Blow shouldn’t be calling it anti-trans to protect children from drastic surgeries. It does seem like overkill to pass laws about pronouns, but then again, it also seems idiotic and ridiculous to teach children nonsense about pronouns.

As Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, recently told me, the number of signed bills is likely to move higher: “There’s 12 more that are sitting on governors’ desks, so you could be at nearly 100 new restrictions on the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community by the end of this cycle.”

For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.

But there is no emergency for LGB people. It’s all about the T, but lumping them together makes it look more tragic and scary.

The way this kind of terrorism works is that it not only punishes expression, condemns identities and cuts off avenues for receiving care but also creates an aura of hostility and issues grievous threats. It’s like burning a cross on someone’s lawn: It’s an attempt to frighten people into compliance and submission.

No, it is not like burning a cross on someone’s lawn. Trans people don’t have a four century history of forced unpaid labor and the violence that backs it. Trans people are not in any way comparable to the descendants of enslaved people.

And one of the saddest aspects of this episode has been seeing a small but vocal group of people who claim to be liberal — and who one would think would be allies — aid and abet the arguments of transphobes.

Some are feminists who have essentially argued that full inclusion of trans women is anti-feminist — that it’s harmful to or an assault on the rights of cisgender women.

Because it is. People reading this already know the ways it is so I won’t belabor them, but it’s definitely one of the saddest aspects of this car crash that men like Blow simply brush them aside.

H/t J.A.