Queer youth often tell me that the online gaming world is an openly hostile place filled with anti LGBTQ slurs and hate speech. The late Brian Mack, one of the founders of Prism & Pen, wrote about that issue several times from his own personal perspective as a young, Black, trans adult.

He often spoke to me personally about the hatred and slurs he encountered in the gaming world.

Lack of empathy, indeed. Any queer person in the U.S. could opine about that subject for hours, probably.

That has to be part of the reason violence against us is exploding, and why open hate speech is increasingly ordinary and accepted.

Seen Twitter lately? I've been called the F word there more times than I can count in recent months, and reporting no longer results in slurs like that being taken down — as empathy further erodes.