Mario Fratto’s transphobic Twitter post is shameful.  His response to the consequences of his actions is pathetic.  And the purpose of his public claims of victimization is obvious: to gin up the outrage necessary to fuel his ongoing political ambitions.

It’s not going to work, Mario.  There are too few of your loud, insistent, obnoxious supporters, and there are too many of us: the members of the LGBTQ+ community, our beloved allies, and the countless people who believe that we all deserve to live with respect and dignity.  Your antics may earn you a brief bump in the relevance you so desperately crave, but it will fail, as all causes built on hate eventually fail.  Love always wins in the long run.

Still, your words and actions require a response, because they remain dangerous in the short term.  Your conflation of diverse gender identities with mental illness is wrong in a factual sense and in a moral sense.  You succeeded in being transphobic and ableist in one mean-spirited tweet, contributing to the ongoing marginalization and dehumanization of both groups.  This will inevitably contribute to the already rampant violence experienced by transgender people, which reached a record high in 2021, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

You claim to have received at least one death threat as a result of all this, and that is concerning since we abhor violence.  But transgender people are the ones at greater risk of death through self-harm or murder due to dehumanizing rhetoric like yours, Mario.

Let’s not forget that, despite your breathless worry over your right to free speech, your tweet was in direct violation of Twitter’s terms.  Twitter sets and interprets its own policies, and the First Amendment does not govern speech on privately-owned social media platforms–a distinction of which a lawyer and past aspirant for government office should be aware.  And there’s no First Amendment protection whatsoever for hate speech, for which your tweet amply qualifies.  The bottom line is that your tweet was both factually incorrect and actively harmful, and there is no place for that kind of speech in responsible public discourse.  One is left to question whether you’re truly unaware of the well-established limits of free speech, which raises questions about your professional competence, or whether you’re simply feigning surprise in order to manipulate your extremist supporters.  Perhaps we’ll never know.

While your self-serving outrage and strained legal arguments suck all the air out of the conversation, contributing to the social division that so many Americans are properly tired of, there are LGBTQ+-led organizations all around our region focused on building up, not tearing down.  In your own home town of Geneva, Mario, the Center of the Finger Lakes maintains a calendar full of opportunities for community members to find each other and an array of services that includes Safe Zone training, legal and medical assistance, and crime victim advocacy.

In Penn Yan, Keuka Compass hosts regular social gatherings and community education sessions to overcome barriers between folks of different generations and philosophies.  On Valentine’s Day, they held an “LGBTQ+ 101” session on terminology and gender pronouns, where one self-described conservative announced that she had learned a lot and would encourage her friends to attend.

And Rochester LGBTQ+ Together holds film and book discussions, highlights the LGBTQ+-influenced history of their city and its landmarks, and hosts wellness activities like hikes on the region’s many beautiful trails, promoting them to new visitors of all backgrounds.

These are just a few examples of the many ways that LGBTQ+ folks continue, despite the vitriol of public figures like you, to choose love and to contribute to wider society.  That's the difference between us, Mario: while your actions play a role in fomenting very real threats to us, we concentrate on building resilience and community.  We work to lift each other up and to create a more positive world, while your goal is one that's more divided and filled with hate expressly generated to manipulate people into giving their votes away on the basis of fear and disinformation.

We hope that the people of our region remember this the next time someone like you, Mario, tries to gain power by claiming victimization, by stoking fear and anger, and by dehumanizing members of our community.