When I was in high school, the Catholic school in the area, I heard a rumour that a gay student was receiving “counselling”. I never found out who they were. But that mere thought was just one of the many overwhelming things that successfully pushed a naive, scared trans child further into the closet, not to emerge for almost a decade.

So, you could imagine that I have strong feelings about efforts to create safer environments for queer children and teens to be themselves. I wonder how radically different, and how much happier, my youth would have been had I been free to be me, instead of being forced to present a masculine facade. I remember how conflicted and wrong and ashamed I felt, and I want no one to ever have to suffer that. No one should lose their childhood years like that.

This caretaker government has made clear just how hostile the powerful religious forces in this country are to the very existence of queer people. Skin-curling bisexuals. Gender-whispering educators. Promulgating the right to jeopardise the education of vulnerable children. They barely conceal their hatred with weasel words, squeezing harder and harder as their grip on power slips away.

To call these people Christians is a sick joke. There is no love in what they preach.

But despite the overwhelming public defence from the majority of our society, the fact that our livelihoods and happiness remain the punching bag of desperate reactionaries makes me ill. It’s just a battle in the war. Well funded Christian zealotry is mobilising all around the western world.

It’s a fact that transgender people are their targets, now that their attempt to vilify gay people has completely failed. The United Kingdom is infamous for the moral panic in the media. In the United States, dozens of states are aggressively legislating to constrain trans people. And what happens there is inevitably imported here…

At times like these, like during the toxic survey last year, I despair, I feel overwhelmed, turning numb. But I’m thankful for my newfound security, and the friends I can rely on. I worry about those who aren’t so lucky.

I want to fight this nightmare forming around us. Where bigoted division sets us apart and into hierarchies of dominance. Where the marginalised suffer at the hands of the selfish. Where those who dream of a better world are powerless, condemned to the nightmare of the past.

The precipice we approach becomes starker by the day. We need radical change now. Let’s wake up the world.