Shortly before the beginning of Pride month, the mayor of San Francisco a city whose metropolitan area has the countrys highest percentage of adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender announced that she would not march in the citys annual Pride Parade due to organizers banning uniformed police officers from marching.

One of the central planks of the movement for better policing is a demand that the people who serve in uniform better represent the communities they are policing, Mayor London Breed said . We cant say, We want more Black officers, or We want more LGBTQ officers, and then treat those officers with disrespect when they actually step up and serve.

Breed isnt alone here. Any number of Democratic politicians have employed this disingenuous argument when trying to justify a feckless fealty to law enforcement for their own political expediency.

For starters, who is we?

As mayor of a city like San Francisco, I doubt Breed is unaware of the fraught relationship the LGBTQ community has always had with law enforcement. The countrys first Pride marches were organized to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar an event remembered today as the 1969 Stonewall Uprising . Pride may garner headlines now from companies like Postmates creating bottom-friendly menus , but it can never be divorced from its origin story of trans women fighting back against police harassment.