Happy pride month! Or, to you straight and cisgender folk, happy Kia Summer Sales Event. Pride month is the one month of the year in which the queer community can fully enjoy the queer experience, without cisgender and heterosexual people breathing down our backs and insulting us for existing. All queer people can come together to celebrate. After facing centuries of oppression, LGBT+ folk kind of deserve some time in the spotlight, right? Well, not everyone thinks so. There are always people who don’t think that we have a reason to celebrate at all, and then there are people who think that there should be a “straight pride month.” I’m going to say this in the nicest way possible- you do not need it.

The entire purpose of pride month is so that queer people can come out of the shadows (and the closet) to have their history and advancements represented, and to fight back against having to stay hidden for so long. Kindly explain to me when cisgender heterosexual people have ever had to stay hidden? Their lives and love have been shown and displayed for centuries without hesitation- a historian has never looked at a man’s wife and said she was “just his best friend.” Cis and straight people have never had to fight to convince people they were human enough to get married. They have never had a law like the “LGBT+ Panic Defense” placed against them. In fact, most straight and cis people don’t even know what that is, because it doesn’t affect them. Straight people have never been censored in movies and games; you’ve never had your identity and existence denied by people who don’t know you. What, exactly, makes you think you need a month for yourselves? You’ve had centuries of everyone kissing your boots- why do you demand people pay you more attention when everyone is already looking at you?

When a queer person vents about prejudice placed against them for their identity, most people will say something along the lines of “you’ve already gotten your marriage rights; why do you want so much more?” Marriage was never the end goal for LGBT+ activists. It was about being respected and seen as equal. Just as an example, transgender people not being allowed into sports or into the military is treating them as unequal. Cisgender people have never been denied access into the military or sports due to being cisgender. No one has ever thrown a hissy fit about your inclusion, or used religion to say you shouldn’t exist. Nowadays, you’ll hear Christian LGBT+ activists saying that the Bible was mistranslated, so you shouldn’t be mad at the people who threw the homophobic and transphobic verses at you because they were misinformed. That misinformation does not undo the damage done unto the queer community and the oppression that the community was put through. Straight and cisgender people have never been oppressed by religion.

I know why straight people want a pride month. It’s because they feel left out of the “special club.” They want to feel special because LGBT+ people are being treated as special, for once. The thing is, they have been seen as better than queer people for centuries. They want the party but don’t understand the reason for throwing it. You have not gone through the turmoil of the queer community, and queer people telling you that isn’t oppression or “heterophobia,” it’s a fact.

You do not need a pride month. Stop asking for one.