I know that for gay marriage and acceptance there's been some studies that having gay characters in TV helped shape public perception. I think the study was around people watching Will and Grace and Modern Family and their acceptance of gay marriage.

It's kind of beautiful that watching imaginary characters can make such a emotional impact since we bond with this "people". That's why representation on mass media is so important especially since most people won't meet a trans person in real life since they are a small percentage of the population. Especially if they are talking about their own life.

Funnily enough, meeting far-right people increased my far-right-ophobia.

Similarly, 20% of respondents who are personally close to a trans person agree that it’s never appropriate to discuss that some people are trans in public schools — a view that has been pushed by the anti-LGBTQ+ group Moms for Liberty and other so-called “parents’ rights” groups. That percentage rose to 41% among respondents who don’t know any transgender people.

Trans people must be very powerful, if the mere knowledge of their existence appears to be this dangerous to these ppl.

I met trans folk in high school and that's all it took to push me out of a massive billion dollar cult.

Trans folks are such a small sliver of the population, it's very difficult for most people to know a trans person.

On top of this, many trans people try to live "stealth" so they're not harassed for simply existing.

It's sad, because this is a known phenomenon. It's the "why" of why LGB acceptance has grown in the last several decades, it turns out when friends and loved ones are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, it becomes something people are more willing to accept.

LGB is about 3.5% of the population while T is about 0.3%.

It's so much harder for people to meet a trans person to begin with, just based on numbers. This puts trans people at a natural disadvantage in being able to grow acceptance in society.

Now this is where I put on my tinfoil fucking hat.

I feel like conservatives chose trans people as a target because they know this, too. They know the small numbers mean acceptance will be an even slower and harder road than for the LGB part of the community. They're fucking banking on it, so they can continue to sew division and hate.

That's logical in retrospect, isn't it?

This is the biggest issue in our country tbh, there's a reason rural people are more bigoted and it's because they don't see LGTBQ+/other races/anyone different at all in their tiny world, and not knowing creates fear.

Living in cities you're constantly surrounded by so many people that you just ignore everyone, and for the most part are just "let everyone do their own thing". People really need to step out of their comfort zones.

Americans who have a close personal relationship with someone who is transgender (a close friend, a family member, or they themselves are transgender) are generally comfortable with learning that a friend is transgender (62%). Americans who have an acquaintance who is transgender are similarly likely to say they would be comfortable learning a friend is transgender (57%). Around one-third of Americans who do not know anyone who is transgender (32%) say they would be comfortable learning that a friend is trans.

From the survey itself which the article linked to. https://www.prri.org/research/the-politics-of-gender-pronouns-and-public-education/

I went from trans-tolerant ("do what you want it's none of my business") to trans-supportive largely because of parasocial relationships with trans creators: PhilophyTube, ContraPoints, JessieGender, Jimquisition, Chipflake, Jammidodger, and NOAHFINCE. Then there's nonbinary and trans-adjacent creators like Thought Slime (some kind of nonbinary?), CJ the X (nonbinary presentation?), Mother's Basement (gf is Yazzie, trans woman), and Shaun (has entire hour long campaign videos about the BBC's transphobia). Point being, knowing a trans person IRL is much less of barrier than you'd think since parasociality seems to cover it, and trans and trans-supportive creators have gotten a lot more open about being on the internet.

(yes NB is considered trans but 1. people don't generally think of it that way and 2. I'm an AMAB demiboy and feel like that me being "trans" would appropriate the struggles of "real" trans people when my own identity is a "rounding error", and to a large degree feel like gender nonconformity is less stigmatized than out-and-out binary trans people. I'm not transmedicalist, NB are still valid and may or may not want their own gender confirmation stuff, but feel like "trans" as a label is too broad an umbrella, since it basically covers all gender nonconformity)

It's so much deeper than that. For a lot of these *phobias, the concept of being friends with such a person is so foreign that merely reading a story about inter-group friendship has a measurable positive impact. See the below excerpt.

• Cernat, V. (2011). Extended Contact Effects: Is Exposure to Positive Outgroup Exemplars Sufficient or Is Interaction With Ingroup Members Necessary?. Journal Of Social Psychology, 151(6), 737-753. doi:10.1080/00224545.2010.522622

Participants who read a story about the friendship between a member of a stigmatized group and the member of another outgroup scored higher on outgroup admiration than a control group and felt less threatened by the prospect of interacting with a member of the target outgroup. However, reduction of outgroup disgust, negative stereotypes, biased beliefs, and anxiety was or tended to be highest among participants who read a story about the friendship between a member of a stigmatized group and an ingroup member. (p. 747)

Basically, it's like these people have never imagined the target of their bias as someone who you COULD be friends with.

This is absolutely a real and important effect, but we should bear in mind that this poll isn't the thing proving it so it's kind of a bad headline. In particular, the headline suggests that this is a new and tentative finding rather than something that's been known for ages, and that it's possible to disprove the effect by knocking down this survey. Intergroup contact theory actually goes back to the 50s and AFAICT is incredibly well-established.

To prove the effect exists with a survey like this, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who "don't know any trans people" because they don't know any trans people from the people who "don't know any trans people" because all the trans people in their life are terrified of coming out to them. Conversely, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who "know a trans person" because they know someone who's out to the world from the people who "know a trans person" because they know someone who's out to only a very few people who they already had good reason to believe would be supportive. There are ways of doing this for people who are better at statistics and experiment design than me, and as I understand it there are studies which do it carefully and do prove the effect, but this isn't one of them and doesn't try to be. (And why should it try to be, when the effect's existence has already been established and studied separately, and when the raw data on a large current sample is useful without reinventing the wheel?)

This is the reason regressive troglodytes have fixated on trans people. They are such a small portion of the population, that the vast majority of their base doesn't know one, or anyone they do know is closeted.

It worked with gay people until we all decided to say fuck it and come out en masse anyway. They love making minorities miserable, because they can point to that misery and pretend it's an innate condition of being that minority rather than the extensive ecosystem of oppression that they created to make us miserable.

So now that their gay Boogeyman is gone, they've moved on to trans people. If that stops working, they've got furries in their back pocket. It's a never ending parade of hatred from the right.

no shit sherlock

Love this. I also suspect that the correlation/causation goes both ways: trans people are more likely going to tell a friend they're trans if that person is not transphobic.

This just in! Water is WET!!! Full report at 9.

Though trans people being fairly uncommon is certainly an issue on this front as other people have pointed out, it's quite nice to know that people have become more accepting by very nature of just knowing me

This sort of thing is great motivation for me to continue being out of the closet to the general public :)

It's why they stopped going after gay marriage so hard. It's tough to be against gay marriage when most people know someone who is gay and sees that it's not a big deal. The trans community is much much smaller so there's a good chance that someone doesn't know anyone who identifies as such, I'm one of those people. It makes it an easy target for conservatives to vilify and create more hate and division which leads to more campaign contributions.