“Ignore the Haters” Isn’t Advice, It’s Avoidance: How to Actually Step in as an Ally

“Ignore the haters” is the go-to response to LGBTQIA+ hate, but it is avoidance dressed up as comfort. Here’s what real allyship and bystander intervention look like.

There is a script that well-intentioned people reach for when someone tells them about the hate they’ve faced for being LGBTQIA+, or even when someone makes a video correcting that person. You will still find this in the comments. You already know it. “Ignore them.” “Don’t let them get to you.” “You’re beautiful; just be yourself.”

It sounds like support. It is usually meant as support. And it almost never lands as support, because it quietly moves the problem from the person doing the harm to the person who was harmed.

Here’s what that advice actually does. It treats the hate as weather, something that just happens, rather than a choice someone made. It puts the work of managing the harm on the person who was targeted, as if the fix is for that person to develop thicker skin, rather than for someone else to stop being cruel. And it treats each incident like it’s the first and only one, when in reality this has been building for years and shows no sign of slowing down. Anti-LGBTQIA+ hate crimes have climbed for four straight years according to FBI data, and anti-transgender hate crimes specifically are up 55% since 2020. This isn’t a one-time thing anyone needs to shake off. It’s a pattern.

Nobody says this to be dismissive. Most people saying it are trying to comfort you. But comfort without naming the actual problem is just a nicer way of looking away. People saying it might be carrying that same bias themselves and working through it, and “ignore them” is easier to say than sitting with the discomfort of admitting they used to think, or sometimes still think, some of the same things haters are saying. Others might genuinely not know what else to offer, because nobody ever showed them what real support looks like beyond reassurance. And some are just repeating what they were told to say to someone who’s hurting, without ever examining whether it actually helps.

Why “Ignore the Haters” Is Bad Advice for LGBTQIA+ People

Confrontation is uncomfortable. Naming someone’s behavior as harmful, even gently, means risking that they get defensive, that the room gets tense, that you become the person who “made it weird.” A lot of us were raised in families, schools, and workplaces that treat conflict itself as the failure, rather than the thing that caused the conflict. So the instinct is to smooth things over, and the fastest way to smooth things over is to comfort the person who got hurt rather than confront the person who did the hurting.

There’s also a version of this that shows up from the other direction: people who show up wanting to educate everyone, all at once, as if a stranger owes them their full attention and willingness to be corrected in that exact moment. That approach comes from a good place too, but it often assumes people will sit and absorb a full lesson on the spot. Most won’t. Naming a problem doesn’t require a seminar.

Real allyship sits in the middle of those two extremes. It’s not comforting the target and calling it a day. It’s not cornering someone with a lecture either. It’s stepping in, saying something specific and grounded, and moving on.

What Real LGBTQ+ Allyship and Bystander Intervention Look Like

Right To Be, the organization formerly known as Hollaback!, built a framework in 2012 with Green Dot called the 5 Ds of bystander intervention. It’s built for street harassment, but the same five moves work almost anywhere someone is being targeted, at a family dinner, in a classroom, in a group chat, in a meeting.

Distract. Interrupt the moment without confronting anyone directly. Change the subject, ask an unrelated question, physically redirect attention. This buys the person being targeted a way out without putting them at the center of a confrontation they didn’t ask for.

Delegate. Bring in someone with more standing to address it: a manager, a professor, an HR contact, a host. You don’t have to be the one holding all the weight.

Document. If it’s safe and appropriate, keep a record. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do isn’t stopping the moment itself; it’s making sure there’s proof it happened.

Delay. Can’t act in the moment? Check in after. Ask the person how they’re doing. Let them know you saw it, and it wasn’t okay. This matters more than people think. Being seen after the fact still counts.

Direct. Name it, plainly, in the moment. “That’s not okay.” “That joke isn’t landing the way you think it is.” “Let’s not go there.” Direct doesn’t mean loud or aggressive. It means clear.

None of these require you to win an argument or convert anyone on the spot. They require you to make it obvious, to everyone in the room, that what just happened didn’t go unnoticed.

What the 5 Ds Look Like Online

The 5 Ds were built for the sidewalk and the subway, situations where you’re standing next to someone in real time. Online harassment moves differently. There’s no shared physical space, the harasser often has an audience cheering them on, and the target might not see your response for hours. Right To Be has adapted the same five moves for exactly this.

Distract, online, isn’t really a thing. You can’t redirect someone’s attention in a comment section the way you can on a train platform. Skip it.

Delegate looks like reporting and tagging. Report the comment or account to the platform. If it’s happening in a space with moderators, tag them in. If you have more reach or credibility in that space than the person being targeted, use it to pull in someone who can act.

Document matters even more online, because evidence disappears. When platforms remove harassing content, the proof goes with it. Screenshot it. Right To Be specifically recommends putting screenshots in a folder and sending them to the person being targeted rather than pasting the images directly into a message, so they get to choose when, or if, they look at it. Something like “I want to make sure you have a record of this, saving these in case you need them” respects that they might not want to see it again right now.

Delay online means checking in after the pile-on. A DM, a comment on something unrelated, anything that says “I saw what happened and I’m thinking of you” lands even if you didn’t say anything publicly in the moment.

Direct online is public support. A comment that says the hate was out of line, a reply that fact-checks a false claim, a post that redirects people to the real account if someone’s being impersonated. Right To Be notes that supportive comments are the single most requested form of help on their platform, because they do two things at once: they tell the person they didn’t deserve it, and they show anyone else watching that this community won’t just let it slide. The common thread, in person or online, is the same. Silence reads as agreement. You don’t need a perfect response. You need a visible one.

What Research Actually Shows

This isn’t a magic fix, and it’s worth being honest about what the evidence does and doesn’t support. The 5 Ds are one tool, not a guarantee.

Here’s what the research backs up. A 2017 study on HeartMob, Right To Be’s online harassment support platform, found that 57% of people who experienced harassment said the platform’s support was very or somewhat helpful in healing from that trauma. The same study found that users felt validated when their experience was recognized and named as online harassment, and that being connected to people who understood their specific situation mattered. In plain terms, the Direct and Document moves have real, measured evidence behind them for helping the person who was targeted.

Separately, studies on bystander training programs consistently show they work at changing the bystander: people come out more willing to act, more confident they can act effectively, and more likely to report actually stepping in later. A UK-based community program tracked this out to four months after training and still saw the gains hold.

Here’s the honest gap. There’s much less research on whether bystander intervention actually reduces the amount of harm happening in the first place, compared to how much research exists on making bystanders more willing to step in. A 2023 review of the research pointed this out directly. Researchers know a lot about how to make bystanders more willing to step in, but a lot less about whether stepping in actually helps. That gap matters, because a well-meaning bystander who doesn’t know what actually works can end up making things harder for the person they’re trying to support.

None of that means don’t bother. It means treating the 5 Ds as what they are, a practical, research-informed way to respond that has real evidence of helping the person on the receiving end, not a proven cure for hate itself. Naming the problem is still better than pretending it isn’t there. It’s just one tool, used alongside everything else that actually shifts a culture: policy, accountability, and people refusing to let it be normal.

What Actually Reduces the Hate, Long-Term

Everything above is about responding once hate has already happened. A separate, deeper question is what prevents it in the first place, and there is real research here.

Intergroup contact works, and it’s the strongest single ingredient we have.

Intergroup contact means real, structured interaction between people from different groups, ideally on equal footing and working toward something shared, that helps replace assumptions with an actual relationship. A 2006 meta-analysis by psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, drawing on over 500 separate studies, found that this kind of contact consistently reduces prejudice, with especially strong effects for anti-gay and anti-lesbian bias. One specific study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2021, brought LGBTQIA+ educators into structured, in-person sessions with participants and found the reduction in bias lasted at least twelve months, strongest among people who went on to form actual friendships with someone in the group. The kind of contact that works is direct, face-to-face, and cooperative, not just watching a video or reading a pamphlet about LGBTQIA+ people. Intergroup contact isn’t a feel-good extra. It’s the thing doing most of the work.

Education helps, but works best paired with intergroup contact, not alone.

A 2014 meta-analysis by Bartoş, Berger, and Hegarty in the Journal of Sex Research compared education-only programs, contact-only programs, and the two combined. Straight information delivery raised what people knew, but moved attitudes less than contact did. The strongest results came from combining the two: learning the facts and having a real relationship or conversation with someone it affects.

Not every kind of bias responds the same way, which is worth knowing before designing any training.

Anti-bisexual prejudice has turned out to be unusually stubborn. A 2025 review in the journal Psychology & Sexuality by Manalastas and colleagues pooled 14 randomized controlled trials and found that, overall, these interventions barely moved the needle. The one approach that did show a real, if modest, effect was combining contact with multicultural education together, not either alone. Researchers link this to two things stacked on top of each other: monosexism, the assumption that only being attracted to one gender is legitimate, and erasure, the idea that bisexuality itself isn’t a real, stable identity. That’s a different problem than what drives anti-gay bias, and it doesn’t respond to the same fix.

Anti-transgender prejudice has its own separate drivers too, tied more to rigid ideas about gender itself, the belief that gender is fixed and binary, than to unfamiliarity alone. Direct, one-on-one contact remains the most effective lever here as well. A widely cited 2016 study by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, published in Science, found that a single ten-minute door-to-door conversation built around asking people to genuinely consider someone else’s perspective reduced anti-trans prejudice for at least three to four months afterward, far longer than a typical one-off training.

Scale is the honest weak spot.

 Nearly all of the strongest studies happened in small groups, a classroom, a workshop, a few hundred people at most. A 2021 evaluation of the UK’s National Citizen Service program, published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, looked at what happened when a contact-based program was rolled out to over 2,000 adolescents at once. The effects were real but noticeably smaller and harder to measure than in small-scale studies. A workshop that clearly shifts twenty people in a room doesn’t automatically shift an entire campus or workplace the same way. That doesn’t mean give up on bigger efforts; it means expecting the effect to shrink as the group grows, and building in a way to actually check whether it’s working rather than assuming it is.

Mandatory, blame-focused training is the version most likely to backfire.

Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev studied corporate diversity training across hundreds of companies over decades and reported in the Harvard Business Review that when training is required and framed around fault or legal risk, gains often disappear within a day or two, and it can sometimes provoke backlash instead of reducing bias. Voluntary, relationship-based approaches consistently hold up better.

Put simply: contact plus education beats either alone; different biases need different approaches instead of one generic training; and durability and scale are the two places most programs quietly fall short. If you’re building anything meant to actually shift how people think rather than just how they perform in the moment, those are the three things to design around.

How to Respond When Someone Tells You They’ve Experienced Hate

When someone trusts you enough to tell you what happened to them, the first thing they need isn’t a fix. It’s to feel believed. Before anything else, let them know you hear them and you’re not going anywhere. Something as simple as “I’m so glad you told me” or “I’m right here” does more in that first moment than any advice will.

Resist the pull toward reassurance. “Ignore them” and “you’re beautiful” feel kind to say, but they rush past what actually happened. Try this instead: “That’s not okay, and it was never your job to just take it.” Let the weight of what happened land instead of smoothing it over. You don’t have to fix it in that sentence. You just have to name it honestly.

Then, gently, let them lead. Ask what they need right now, not what you think they should do. Maybe that’s someone to vent to without any advice attached. Maybe it’s helping them figure out how to report it. Maybe it’s just company, sitting with them for a few minutes so they’re not alone with it. All three are real support. None of them require you to have the perfect thing to say.

If you’re the one who witnesses it happening, in the moment, pick one of the five moves above and use it. You don’t need the right words, polished or clever. You need to be visible. A short, steady “that’s not okay” does more than silence ever will, and checking in afterward still counts even if you couldn’t say anything in the moment itself.

The goal was never to make hate disappear by ignoring it. It’s been building for years specifically because so many well-meaning people have practiced looking away, believing that was the kind thing to do. It wasn’t unkind, but it also wasn’t enough. Naming what happened, even imperfectly, even with words that don’t come out exactly right, is what starts to change that. The people you support won’t remember if you said the perfect thing. They’ll remember that you stayed, and that you didn’t ask them to pretend it didn’t hurt.

References

Bartoş, S. E., Berger, I., & Hegarty, P. (2014). Interventions to reduce sexual prejudice: A study-space analysis and meta-analytic review. Journal of Sex Research, 51(4), 363–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2013.871625

Blackwell, L., Dimond, J., Schoenebeck, S., & Lampe, C. (2017). Classification and its consequences for online harassment: Design insights from HeartMob. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW), Article 24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134659

Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2016). Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing. Science, 352(6282), 220–224. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9713

Dobbin, F., & Kalev, A. (2016, July–August). Why diversity programs fail. Harvard Business Review, 94(7/8), 52–60.

Federal Bureau of Investigation hate crime data as reported in: Security.org. (2025). Anti-LGBT hate crimes are rising, but we really don’t know how much. https://www.security.org/resources/anti-lgbt-hate-crime-stats/

USAFacts. (2025). Are hate crimes on the rise? https://usafacts.org/articles/which-groups-have-experienced-an-increase-in-hate-crimes/

Hatch, H. A., Warner, R. H., Grundy, J., & Heck, N. C. (2025). Interventions to reduce transgender prejudice: A meta-analysis. Sex Roles. Advance online publication.

Kuskoff, E., & Parsell, C. (2023). Bystander intervention in intimate partner violence: A scoping review of experiences and outcomes. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231195886

Manalastas, E. J., Benjamin, J., Blumenau, J., Shea, M., & Feinstein, B. A. (2025). Interventions to reduce prejudice against bisexual people and bisexuality: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychology & Sexuality. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2025.2500964

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751

Right To Be. (2012). 5 Ds of bystander intervention. https://righttobe.org/guides/bystander-intervention-training/

Right To Be. (n.d.). Bystander intervention online. https://righttobe.org/guides/bystander-intervention-online/