I'm thinking about The Loud House as I read this sentence. It's been in the crosshairs of angry opposition from people who claim that queer characters should not appear in children's television, and who further claim that representation like this is unrealistic.

But is it? The Loud House centers around the lives of the children in a very large family. The kids have lots of friends, who often fill the house. Among all of them, we're probably talking about a friend group that well exceeds 100 people.

Out of all those people, two of them are apparently a lesbian couple. Additionally, a pair of gay dads occasionally make a cameo appearance.

How unrealistic is that, actually? The representation in Loud House IS unrealistic in that statistics would indicate that a few more characters should be queer. I'm not complaining, of course; any amount of representation is fabulous. I'm just noting that 2 lesbians and 2 gay men would be normal and expected number in any group of people that size — and you'd actually expect at least a handful more.

The same holds across the board, really. Complaints about over-representation of queer characters are often based on the notion that queer people are vanishingly rare in society.

Of course, this simply isn't true, but I grant it might feel true to the insular/isolated homophobes and transphobes making the complaints.