A transgender woman in New York said that she has been receiving threatening messages from an anonymous neighbor for years for her rainbow flag, harassment that resulted in her cat being killed and cut in half.
So her community pulled together and painted her house rainbow colors in response to the hatred.
“I had put a rainbow flag on my house,” she told Now This News. “And somebody around here didn’t like the fact that the rainbow flag was up.”
She said that she ended up getting four profanity-laden hate mail letters from the neighbor, who never identified themselves.
But she said that the gruesome act made her “determined to stand up even more.”
She posted about her plan to paint the house on Facebook and it turned into a community event.
“I didn’t quite expect that it was going to be that many people here,” she said, adding that people kept “pouring in” throughout the day to help paint and set up a grill and play music.
“That is what community is all about: standing together and fighting back against hatred and bigotry,” she said.
She also hopes that her story will inspire other trans people to be themselves.
