In 2004 polls showed that 60 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage, while only 31 percent were in favor. Today 61 percent support same-sex marriage, while 31 percent oppose it.



Support for same-sex marriage has increased among nearly all demographic groups, across different generations, partisan lines and religious faiths.



Samantha Schmidt argues in the Washington Post that the main reason for this reversal is that gay and lesbian people started to come out in great numbers. At the same time gay and lesbians became much more visible in the media.

But there was something different about the gay and lesbian community, compared with other minority groups. They were in every socioeconomic and racial group, every generation, in small towns and big cities. Unlike other demographics, “sexuality is a dimension that is everywhere,” [psychology professor Mahzarin] Banaji said. “It is not segregated.” The more connections Americans made with gay or lesbian people, the more positive their attitudes toward them became — a trend social scientists call “the contact hypothesis.”… What might be different about the gay community, Banaji speculated, is that even before a person came out, “love was in place.” A parent or a co-worker already knows and loves a gay person, and then discovers a person’s sexuality, which is often not obvious right away. “That, I think, is very different from something like age, or race, or body weight that just presents itself immediately upon seeing a person for the first time.”



This is an important lesson for the T part of the LGBTQA community. One of the reasons transphobes – being those radical feminists or right wing fundamentalists – are panicking about trans people and trans kids right now, is because trans people are becoming more visible and more accepted.

Even if we do see examples of TERF and right wing “Christian” women invalidating their own children, more and more parents come out fighting for their trans kids, protecting them against the bigots who attack them.

It is so much harder to demonize and pathologize someone you know, and someone who who is clearly loved.

In other words: We can fight this toxic TRUMP/TERF backlash, by showing the world the human face of trans people, over and over and over again.

Photo: Zackary Drucker, Gender Spectrum Collection