Television needs to stop killing off the queer characters

The amount of queer women who have died on television so far in 2016 is astounding.

It was pointed out in this post on Tumblr, that by the 20th of March, 2016, 8 women who love women have been killed off.

This is Lexa from The 100. She was openly a lesbian, and was killed by a stray bullet.

The Tumblr post then links to this report, which tells us that there were only 35 lesbian and bisexual women who were expected to appear on primetime programming this year. That’s already a very, very small amount of queer women to be on television already. The message that being a lesbian, or being bisexual is something uncommon is already being perpetrated to young girls who are, or who are questioning, whether or not they belong to this minority.

To then watch as these women are killed, one after the other, is even more damaging. It’s harmful for young girls who like girls, or are questioning whether they like girls, to see people like themselves being repeatedly killed off.

This is Denise from The Walking Dead. She was killed after getting shot accidentally through the eye.

There are plenty of other plot points that can be used rather than the classic ‘kill your lesbians’ trend which seems to be, even in 2016, still extremely popular. One of Buzzfeed’s latest videos gives some excellent suggestions on what to do with queer women, rather than killing them off, such as letting them get their masters degree.

Surely, a queer woman getting her masters degree is a better thing to show girls who like girls, than a queer woman getting killed? And all of these deaths happened before the 20th March. It’s now the beginning of May: who wants to guess how many have been killed off since, and will be killed off in the future? Not me.

If you want to read about more queer women who have died in television history and really feel the anger, have a read of this.

But for now, I’ll be watching Sidetrack, a web series about girls who like girls, where none of them die.

And here are Adrienne, Asa, Camille, Sloane, Jo, and Allie from Sidetrack. And they are all alive. This is why we need more queer women calling the shots.