following the bois locker room controversy that exposed the shocking normalisation of aggravated sexual assault and objectification of underage girls in the virtual world of urban teens the cbse rushed in to arm students with cyber safety handbooks but ask any member of the lgbtqi community in the country and theyll tell you the many ingenious ways in which they have struggled to take down countless homophobic and transphobic social media pages where public defamation of their gender identity has been the sole selling point most such pages thrive on memes and trolls created out of individual photos freely taken off pride marches and social media handles without the members knowledge or consent and the worst part about this gross violation of individual privacy is that it rarely follows the kind of collective outrage that we recently saw say community members in a heartwrenching facebook post young biotechnologist from chattisgarh shreyansh sharma recently called out content creators of meme pages like the indian memer and yo yo funny singh who had used his crossdressing photos from the mumbai pride march and made a mockery out lgbtqi youth freely expressing themselves when one would expect them to be creating a vaccine to fight coronavirus they used my gender identity to question my potential but the irony is that i am a biotechnologist and just by virtue of that qualification i am closer to creating a vaccine for this virus than these people will ever be he says shreyansh who takes biology tutorials on youtube also had to face flak from his family who these posts reached and who were already struggling to cope with his identity as a transandrogynous personfor 24yearold vijayawadabased business analyst sravan telu the only thing worse than losing close friends over his choice to learn and perform belly dancing was getting publicly humiliated for it by a bunch of homophobes on a meme page telu who identifies as a demisexual had to repeatedly write to the admin of the facebook page after screenshots of his performance were taken off his instagram handle and used to create defamatory content giving way for vulgar and disturbing commentaryafter the incident it suddenly struck me why the women in our belly dancing community although professional performers chose to keep their instagram handles photos private says telu who also faced backlash from extended family members after the trolls went viralclassical dancer and drag artist patruni chidananda sastry who identifies as a gender fluid person found his images from an old photoshoot on an instagram page called hyderabad gays along with hundreds of others which he later learned were photos of queer people taken off dating apps in fact a popular matrimony site for lgbtqi people recently found itself in a soup after the founder allegedly used photos of random queer couples to advertise their serviceit is so common that its appalling says patruni for a while now i have been trying to take down a youtube channel that survives on