But there has also been another force at play: Facebook.

Many in the trans community will tell you that the social network has played an indispensable role in changing for the better what it’s like to live as a transgender person in America. Despite much to be wary of about Facebook — its ubiquity, its invasiveness, its capacity to alter much about the national mood — it has also become a critical tool for visibility and equality, and may be one reason that mainstream attitudes toward transgender people are shifting so rapidly.

“Television made a huge different to the civil rights movement. Absolutely, for this community, it’s been Facebook. Now we have something that’s even more rapid than TV,” said Aidan Key, a transgender rights organizer who runs an annual conference on gender identity issues. “Now you can see real-life transgender people. You can hear their stories. You can see the parents who have transgender children. Just imagine what kind of impact that has had.”

The idea of a social network prompting tolerance may sound more than a tad dreamy in an election year marked by interminable online strife, in which Twitter and Facebook sit at the center of a daily five-alarm fire of outrage and recrimination.

There is now widespread concern that online news is pushing people toward adopting more polarized points of view, not to mention indulging acceptance of baseless ideas and conspiracies. Interacting on the internet, it is usually assumed, dehumanizes us all; it can deaden our capacity for understanding other people. Every day brings fresh horrors from our dystopian online life, whether it’s terrorist recruitment efforts, illegal gun sales on Facebook or the special symbol created by neo-Nazis to target Jews for attack. In other words: Yes, the internet on most days feels like a cesspool.

But the experiences of transgender people on Facebook suggest that many of these assumptions aren’t so open-and-shut. Scholars who study online interaction say that humans do feel empathy online. We can be moved by what happens on the internet and we carry what happens there to our interactions beyond it.