I know this is probably about the hundredth article you’ve read on the election, and the millionth you’ve seen. I respect that, and I respect that you’ve taken the time to click on my article and made the choice to read my words.

I’ll start off by checking my own privilege. I am a white girl from New York City, one of the most liberal and open-minded places in America, and I was able to attend one of the best high schools in the country, never mind in the city. I am currently a college student, and my family is decently well-off. I just paid my first credit card bill, and I am lucky enough to know that if I needed help with it, my parents or someone else in my family would provide that. Not everyone is as lucky as I am.

That being said, I am also a woman. Fewer than one hundred years ago, I and everyone who shares my gender did not have the right to vote in the United States. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, as recently as one year ago, women only made eighty cents for every dollar earned by men. Women still face discrimination in the workplace, and rape culture is still so present in our society that a convicted rapist served only three months in jail for a case in which the woman raped was unable to consent because she was unconscious and intoxicated.

I am a woman, and I am also a lesbian woman. Not even two years ago, I and everyone who shares my sexual orientation did not have the right to get married in the United States—a right that has been considered essentially fundamental and uncontested between heterosexual couples for the two hundred and forty years that our country has existed. Not even four months ago, a heinous mass shooting was committed against the LGBTQ+ community in Orlando, a hate crime whose effect was felt in the larger queer community around the country and around the world.

In November, just under a month from today, I will be casting my vote for Hillary Clinton. And despite the undeniable privileges I have in my life, I am voting for Hillary Clinton because it is a matter of survival, of life and death. It is a matter of my own survival, both mentally and physically, because I am afraid—afraid of whether my psyche and self-esteem can survive the constant berating of women that will surely erupt should Donald Trump be elected president, and afraid for my own safety as a member of the LGBTQ+ community who wants to be out and proud and vocal about it.

But even more than that, it is a matter of survival for my friends and for the many people who are strangers to me. I am a white girl; I could hide my sexuality and try not to gain any weight, and I’d probably manage to get through a Trump presidency. But for every non-white friend of mine, and every non-white person who is a stranger to me, that is not an option. In an odd, perverted way, I am lucky because I can choose some of what I show to the rest of the world. But my Bengali and Dominican and African-American best friends can’t do that. They can’t hide their skin color for four or eight years and then be okay when Trump leaves office. I fear for their safety. I fear that they will be the victims of hate crimes and police violence, the names I read on social media and have become almost desensitized to after seeing too many. I already have this fear, because Donald Trump has done irreparable damage to something as simple as basic courtesy, respect and kindness that we as humans are supposed to show to others. I am frozen with sheer terror at what our country will become if he is elected president.

I am casting my vote for Hillary Clinton because a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for hate and prejudice and a hundred steps back. I’m with her because voting for anyone else, Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, while they may be the candidates for the idealists, is drawing support away from the viable candidate who has all Americans’ best interests at heart, not just the white Christian Americans’ interests.

I am a woman, and I am a lesbian woman, and I am a Jewish lesbian woman, and I was years from being born when the Holocaust occurred, but I know as surely as the sky is blue that if Donald Trump is our next president come November, we are not far from a repeat of history. So now I am asking you—no, I am begging you—to vote for Hillary Clinton. For me and my friends, and for you and your friends, and for the people who are strangers to you who do not deserve to be subjected to hate.

#ImWithHer.