US celebrates 250th Independence Day, but there’s little to be proud of as LGBTQIA+ people

The United States of America commemorates its 250th anniversary of independence today, but I struggle as a Transgender American to find any reason to feel patriotic or celebratory about it. The country we all inhabit was founded on a contradiction — that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights — yet large swaths of our nation’s peoples were systematically denied, and continue to be denied, those rights by both the government and society. What mak