Would someone please text me the Minnesota shooter’s drag name so I can steer all the kids away from his public library readings?

But seriously, it’s my last column of Pride Month, so about our trans friends and our LBGTQ friends in general in these challenging times, a few things in no particular order …

It’s not that the right wing thinks trans people shouldn’t be able to read books to kids. It’s not that they think trans people shouldn’t be able to get the medical treatment they want. It’s not that they don’t think trans people should be able share all the various freedoms the rest of us (theoretically) enjoy. These are just little shards of the larger truth that usually gets obscured amid this skirmish or that skirmish:

The deeper truth is that the right wing doesn’t think trans people should exist.

And to a large extent, the right wing doesn’t think trans people truly, actually exist at all.

Sure, they know that people identify as trans. But many think those people are simply mistaken, misled, or misguided. It takes a lot of willful ignorance about history and science to maintain that opinion, of course, but nobody said bigots didn’t have fortitude.

Other wingers might recognize that trans people do exist while simply having no ability to deal with them with decency and respect. This, of course, is the trans person’s fault.

In this respect, the U.S. cultural right-winger views LGBTQ Americans the same way they may view anyone else who isn’t a white male American of equal or greater economic standing. Summed up thusly: Not only is my comfort more important than your comfort, but my feelings are more important than your own basic freedoms.

Why is comfort even a factor here? Well, because a given winger hasn’t ever met a trans person. Or they believe the fearmongering propaganda they hear. Or maybe there are other personal insights that said winger was not prepared for.

Another thing that doesn’t get said out loud much: The constant right-wing pushback against trans rights is an effort to recapture an earlier time. An era when trans people did not attempt to have families, to have honest representations of themselves in official documents, or to even move with a minimum of security or authenticity in public circles.

More importantly, what right wingers knowingly or unknowingly work to recreate is a time where LGBTQ youth were relentlessly intimidated and bullied with approval (tacit or otherwise) from authorities, if not by authorities themselves. A time where these kids could not experience a decent childhood unmarred by a campaign of shame at best and violence at worst.

Many won’t admit it, but via the public policies they pursue today, they prefer an environment where trans kids hide themselves, stay ashamed of themselves, or kill themselves.

Many Christian bigots betray their own religion by using as a shield while advancing this worldview. Which reminds me — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — of the Springsteen stage banter about getting pulled over in New Jersey. He explained to the crowd that at that time, you could plead guilty, or not guilty, or “guilty with an explanation.”

Some people — OK, a lot of people — consider themselves religious, not bigoted, when what they’re really doing is pleading bigotry with an explanation. Don’t let them fool themselves.

Remember that “It Gets Better” movement? That always kinda pissed me off. We all know that the underlying translation of “It Gets Better” isn’t that it just miraculously got better. It got better for some LBGTQ kid only because they eventually got old enough and fortunate enough to move out of their hateful house or their backwards-ass community and move toward a community with a better understanding of love and basic decency.

Unless, of course, they didn’t.

The cherry on top is the cultural right’s complete obliviousness to the difficulty and emotional strength involved in accepting yourself as a trans or gay individual in many parts of the country and trying to move forward with your life. The very people the right portrays as weak or somehow flawed often have to summon exceptional strength to have any chance at the type of honest, happy life the rest of us are born much closer to by default.

Millions of Americans think they love the Constitution when what they really love are the document’s invisible asterisks denoting who gets to actually partake in the full set of opportunities it outlines and who doesn’t.

We can’t erase history, but we can get rid of those asterisks.

As some like to say down here, “Y’all Means All.”