Pride Month is a season of visibility. Mainstream media covers our stories, government agencies issue statements and proclamations, corporations peddle our merch and display our flags. Sometimes the attention feels affirming, other times performative. For better or worse, the community becomes impossible to ignore. Everyone is looking. Let’s talk about handling online hate during Pride Month.
Social media has amplified that visibility in ways previous generations could never imagine. More people are creating LGBTQ+ content than ever before. A single post can travel across the world in just a few hours. June’s increase in visibility brings with it another reality. Therapists are posting educational videos. Organizations are sharing resources, community members are documenting their lives, relationships, and experiences. As more content appears, more eyes find it. Not all of those eyes arrive with curiosity, allyship, or goodwill.
For many of us, Pride Month now comes with an additional emotional task: navigating the influx of opportunities for the bigots to puke their same tired, hate-filled arguments and opinions in the cesspool that is the comment section. Some knuckle-dragging fuck-wit’s ignorant comment can land in the middle of an otherwise pleasant afternoon, and while we tell ourselves it doesn’t bother us, we’re used to it, this is the kind of messaging that reinforces unconscious negative core beliefs. Even if the comment comes from someone you’ll (thankfully) never meet. The unconscious emotional impact can linger.
The internet has created the illusion that every opinion deserves a response. It encourages us to believe that if we can just string together the right combination of words, present just the right evidence, or deliver the perfect rebuttal, they’ll get it or they’ll stop. Most of us have imagined that moment. We compose a brilliant response in our heads. The commenter realizes they were wrong. The crowd applauds. Everyone leaves wiser than they arrived.
Unfortunately, that is rarely, if ever, the way of it.
Who’s Posting This Stuff
I mean, I think we all know who is posting this drivel. It’s the hurt people who hurt people you’ve heard tell about. The louder they are the bigger the wound.
Psychological studies the world over consistently point to the same cluster. Deep-seated insecurity. Unmet needs for power and attention. The fragility of a self-esteem so broken it requires someone else’s diminishment to feel stable. In the wild, these comments would have social consequences. On the internet, they don’t. No eye contact, accountability, or throat punch. The distance provided by the world-wide web creates a comfortable environment for the commentor and hands them a megaphone.
Dehumanization works the same way it always has. Strip someone of their personhood in your own mind and harm becomes easier to justify. History has documented where that trajectory ends. Social media is not the first context to weaponize it, it’s just the most efficient one.
The clinical term is deindividuation: shedding your identity, your empathy, and your accountability behind an anonymous screen. What replaces those things is not freedom. It’s a loop of projected inadequacy that deepens over time.
Why We Keep Looking
The reasons why we feel compelled to engage with hate speech online is…complicated. It’s more than morbid curiosity. The reasons are deeply human and, dare I say, understandable. I get it.
The most common driver is moral distress. Most people who stop to read hate speech are appalled by it. That looks horrific, what’s happening? It pulls attention the way a car accident does. Your nervous systems says “Danger…must assess.” That instinct is pure protection biology.
Personal stakes considerably sharpen that pull. When it’s your community, your identity, your people that are the target, scrolling past becomes its own kind of abandonment. Engagement, in this context, is an act of witness. It’s the difference between seeing something and saying something.
Sometimes hate speech lands at a moment when you’re already thinking about a particular topic and instead of triggering disgust, it disrupts your existing framework. I want to be so super clear; this is NOT because the content is valid…it’s just that encountering it sort of forces a confrontation with reality. Let me give you an example:
I’m bisexual. I have built a life and a LGBTQ+ therapy practice in Dallas. I generally see Dallas as a relatively affirming city in a deeply non-affirming state. Last weekend, after the Pride parade, the local content ticked up, and I was enjoying seeing the stories. And because I’m human (see above), I go to the comments. The volume and specificity of the hate comments arrested me. I am guffawed. For a few heavy moments I’m asking myself “It is really safe for me, my friends, my clients, here? I thought we were better than this.”
This is what I mean by disrupting your existing framework.
Social currency plays a role in our engagement too. Hate-filled content generates the loudest conversations in any given news cycle. Engaging with it keeps people fluent in what the room is arguing about. We don’t want to be caught slipping so we must have our finger on the social tone.
The one reason I find most unsettling: a small subset engages for entertainment. Conflict is stimulating. Argument is theater. For some users, hate speech scratches the same itch as a Real Housewives franchise blowup…visceral, consequence-free, and immediately forgettable until the next one.
None of this is shameful to acknowledge, so stop hanging your head. Understanding why we look is the first step toward choosing whether we should.
Arguing With Trolls Rarely Works
Let’s be honest, we all know the trolls are not looking for understanding. They’re looking for an audience.
The fantasy, that if you just find the right words, the right study, the right airtight rebuttal, someone will read it and think, hm, you know what, fair point, is adorable. But it rarely if every works.
Once a belief gets load-bearing for someone’s identity, facts become decorative. You’re not having a conversation. You’re watching someone defend their entire sense of self with whatever’s nearby. They’re rubber, you’re glue. You end up getting tacky and they remain impenetrable.
The pattern is predictable. You address the original redundant, tired, overused and illogical comment. They come back with something equally as monotonous; you quip at that then three more appear out of nowhere. Like malfunctionist goblins emerging from a dank storm drain; moist, chaotic, and relentlessly committed to ruining your night.
The exchange feels exhausting because it was engineered to be exhausting. Resolution was never the point. The point was to offend…and it worked.
Here’s what makes this so insidious for the queer community: this is not abstract conflict. Someone calling your identity a grooming agenda or a mental illness or droning on about God made the rainbow and Adam and Eve is not a bad-faith debate partner you can just log off from. This language lands in your nervous system. It connects to every other time something similar was said. By a parent, a pastor, a classmate, a doctor. The troll spent thirty seconds typing. Your nervous system is going to be ponying up for that for way longer.
There’s a visceral response to these words. Your jaw tightens, your chest gets hot, your shoulders shrink up toward your earlobes. You replay the exchange while making dinner, trying to sleep, focus on work, while doing literally anything else. You compose the perfect response at 2am in the dark like some kind of tortured, highly bothered, slightly unhinged wordsmith. You’ll never send it. It doesn’t matter.
I Say All That To Say This
You’re not going to fix, change, or convince them. The psychological architecture that produces a person who spends their afternoon targeting a stranger’s identity online is not something a well-crafted reply is going to dismantle.
So here’s what you really have control over.
Walk away. Not because they won, they never really win…that’s why they’re camping in the comments. Walk away because your nervous system is not a battleground that belongs to them. The best revenge is living well.
When you do post or comment, when you share something joyful, something real, something vulnerable that celebrates who you are, protect it like the living thing it is. Commit to only engaging the positive responses. Comment on and reply only to the people who show up with warmth, support, allyship. Like the comments that reflect the community you are actually trying to build. Let the hateful ones sit there unacknowledged and unfed. Attention is oxygen to fire of hate speech.
Report everything. Every single time. It’s tedious and it may feel pointless but do it anyway. Platforms respond to volume. Content moderation is an organism that requires repeated input to function. One report disappears into the void. A hundred reports from a hundred people starts costing the platform something. You’re not just protecting yourself when you report. You’re making the environment marginally less hospitable for the next troll.
Think of it this way. Hate speech is a parasite. It requires a living host to survive. Your reaction, your engagement, your visible distress. Remove the host and the organism has nowhere to go. Starve the interaction and you starve the behavior. Not because the person behind the screen magically becomes decent, but because indifference is the one thing a bigot cannot benefit from.
The queer community has survived attempts at erasure that make a comment section look embarrassingly small. You were built for harder things than this. Protect your energy accordingly. Post your joy. Report the hate. Walk away without explanation or apology.
The block button is also a full sentence.
