Watching queer and trans rights get stripped away in real time while companies slap rainbows on products every June feels impossible to ignore now.

Across the US, lawmakers have introduced hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills in recent years, many targeting trans people directly through healthcare bans, ID restrictions, education censorship, bathroom laws, sports bans, and efforts to erase legal recognition of trans existence. The ACLU tracked hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures, many specifically targeting trans people.

This isn't an abstract policy debate. These laws impact access to healthcare, employment, housing, education, safety, and public life. Researchers, legal scholars, and genocide prevention experts have publicly raised alarms about the pattern and scale of these coordinated attacks.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued multiple “Red Flag Alerts” warning about what they describe as an escalating genocidal process against trans people in the United States. Former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars have also publicly warned that the rhetoric and legislation targeting trans people match early stages of genocidal processes historically seen before mass atrocity crimes.

Even legal scholars who debate whether the current moment fits the strict international legal definition of genocide still describe the harm, erasure, and targeted legislation against trans people as severe and systematic.

So yeah, people are angry.

While queer and trans people are fighting for basic safety, dignity, healthcare, and survival, some companies still decide Pride Month is the perfect time to platform authors who openly align themselves with administrations and public figures actively fueling anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric.

You do not get to profit from queer readers during Pride while uplifting people who publicly support the political machine working to erase us.

And dedicating a book to a public figure who has openly and vocally spread hatred toward queer and trans communities is not “neutral.” It is a choice. Public support is political. Dedications are intentional. Silence is intentional, too.

And I hear a certain company is deleting comments.

Book spaces love to talk about community until accountability enters the room.

Queer and trans readers are not overreacting for refusing to financially support people who celebrate those helping dismantle our rights. We are responding rationally to a climate where lawmakers debate our existence daily, while violence against trans people continues rising, and access to care disappears state by state.

Pride started as resistance. Not branding. Not rainbow capitalism. Not “both sides.”

If your business wants queer money, queer trust, and queer community support, people are going to ask where you stand when queer and trans lives are under attack.

Instead, let's go ahead and support businesses who make it known that they align with our identities. Bindery for one, and I'm truly not biased, it has been a joy to see so many queer books published, and majority sapphic too!

There are so many other book boxes out there doing the work year round to demonstrate their allyship.