Both the blog and the Instagram post was followed by a lot of hate speech from the chess community questioning the need for a chess site supporting LGBT+ people. Lichess forums were filled with threads started by bigots and similar comments were spammed to Lichess's social media accounts where the blog post was shared. Fortunately Lichess took steps in moderating the forums threads. In my opinion there's still a lot of comments that should moderated but at least the worst homophobic and transphobic comments were deleted.
LGBT+ people deserve continued support, safety and visibility everywhere and that includes the chess scene. I hope that Lichess taking a stand and giving an outlet for the community to speak is the start of what will be a growing number of similar shows of support strengthening our voice.
