My high school history teacher was a staunch Republican. He to this day starts Facebook posts with ‘Biden voters, explain…” This meant that a lot of how he taught history had a distinctly Republican slant. But there was one thing I remember him saying that stuck with me. It was a paraphrase of a Supreme Court case from a century or more ago, and my teacher said the following: “Everyone has the right to swing their fist, but that right stops when it meets someone else’s face.”

This doesn’t just apply to swinging a fist—it’s pretty applicable to everything, really. People can do and say what they want up to the point that it hurts someone else. If the man who once told me that feminism was pointless and shouldn’t exist can grasp this, it shocks me that nearly half of our representatives in the federal government fail to do the same.

One week ago, Dr. Rachel Levine faced what the New York Times generously called an “emotional debate” over transgender rights during her nomination hearing for the assistant secretary of health position. Dr. Levine, who was confirmed, is now the first openly transgender official confirmed by the Senate.

This “debate,” in which senators including Rand Paul attacked Dr. Levine over so-called “genital mutilation,” was not the only instance in which transgender and other LGBTQIA* rights were discussed on Capitol Hill that day. The House passed, for the second time, the Equality Act, a bill extending the protections of the Civil Rights Act to explicitly include LGBTQIA* individuals. The bill did not pass the Senate in 2019, and it is not expected to this time.

I am not transgender. But I am queer, and I am tired.

I was tired in 2016, when North Carolina introduced their ‘bathroom bill,’ preventing trans people from using any bathroom other than the one corresponding to the sex they were assigned at birth. It was repealed a year later, but knowing that the bill passed revealed a deep-seated discomfort with trans people that is still, somehow, an acceptable platform to have.

I was tired in 2018, when the Supreme Court sided with the bakers who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. I remember that day; I, too, worked at a bakery, and the minute the decision came out, my local Pride Alliance called me and asked for the biggest, most rainbow cake possible in protest. To me, 18 years old and mostly ignorant of the news, the decision was a shock. Why would religious freedom mean a license to discriminate? Why did the simple existence of people different from the bakers make them uncomfortable enough to take the case to the Supreme Court?

It hasn’t even been three years, and I’ve only grown more tired. Currently, lawmakers are using the thin veil of the defense of women’s sports to attack the rights of transgender people. Last week, Marjorie Taylor Greene hung a sign outside her office proclaiming “There are only two genders.” A mere three of the House’s 209 Republicans voted for the Equality Act.

Let me make this clear—I don’t want to split this down party lines. I’m sure there are Republicans who aren’t blatantly transphobic/queerphobic, and I’m sure there are Democrats who are. The issue here is the sheer number of people who don’t see this as a problem, who are so hurt by other people’s identity that they attack them over it.

When I say “attack,” I don’t only mean physically. Make no mistake, what Dr. Levine experienced last week was an attack. The passage and enforcement of the bathroom bill was an attack. The current claims about the impending doom of women’s sports are an attack. They’re convenient arguments to hide behind in an attempt to scare trans people out of existence. These actions operate in the same way that the wedding cake case of 2018—and its successor in 2019—and the actions of Kim Jones, a Kentucky clerk who in 2015 refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex weddings, attempting to get rid of gay marriage by making it inordinately difficult. Jones was still attempting to argue her case until October of last year. But what we’re seeing in our government is more insidious than even those—it’s an attempt to define people out of existence.

These actions have definitely passed the point of hurting others. Saying that is an understatement—every day, the atmosphere of transphobia and other forms of queerphobia that are so prevalent and, apparently, acceptable in this country are hurting people. Lack of acceptance and constant exposure to discrimination drives trans people to attempt suicide at disproportionately high rates.

This discrimination isn’t just something we see in legislatures and courts. It’s omniprescient. It’s not only something Trump says at the CPAC, it’s in people’s homes and on campus—Wash. U. professor Jonathan Katz especially has not been silent about LGBTQIA* issues. Listening to and allowing space for hateful views isn’t “hearing out both sides.” It’s creating an unsafe environment. The lack of backlash against Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s words and actions alone terrifies me. It is not the place of lawmakers to tell people how they can or cannot identify. It’s not anyone’s place.

Queer people exist. Transgender and nonbinary people exist. Deal with it, and stop building an identity around trying to people out of existence.