Arwa Mahdawi is a little behind the curve on the Colorado shooter.

On the eve of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a gunman opened fire in an LGBTQ+ nightclub, killing five people and injuring at least 25 in what is widely thought to have been a hate crime.

One, it’s not an LGBTQ+ nightclub, it’s a gay bar. Its owners call it a gay bar. Two, the gunman’s lawyers are saying he’s “nonbinary” so that makes him part of the mythical “LGBTQ+” so how you gonna deal with that?

Over the past year there has been an escalation in dangerously dehumanising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. The idea that LGBTQ+ people are “groomers” and paedophiles has become a mainstream conservative talking point pushed by everyone from Fox News to Republican politicians.

Now that’s just a falsehood. Grooming and paedophilia are issues to do with trans ideology & proselytizing, not lesbian and gay rights, and it’s not only conservatives who think it’s a bad idea.

The dehumanising rhetoric has been accompanied by growing violence. The Proud Boys, a far-right group, have been disrupting Drag Queen Story Hour events (in which performers read books to children) across the US, often turning up with guns. In September Boston children’s hospital received bomb threats after sustained far-right harassment sparked by the hospital’s work with transgender youths. The tragedy at Club Q didn’t happen in a vacuum.

The Proud Boys should definitely sit down and shut up, but as for Boston Children’s, it’s not just innocuously “working with transgender children,” it’s boasting about its drastic surgeries for children it considers transgender. Elective genital mutilation and/or mastectomy isn’t comparable to talk therapy or the like. I wonder how conscious of hiding the ugly reality Mahdawi was when she did it, or if it’s pretty much automatic by now.