Polling shows that knowing a trans person decreases transphobia
Transphobia has be flourishing in part because most cisgender people say they don't know a transgender person...
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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.
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 why they rail against college education so hard: because a collegiate education often requires you to study things like this, which in turn opens your mind to differing ideas. Which they screech about as "That liberal indoctrination stole my child from me!"
Not to mention in college you're thrown in with thousands of people of all races, sexes, religions, and culture's, and you are bound to be exposed to new ways of thinking. If you stay in your home town of 5000 people you never have to be exposed to other ways of thinking.
I've heard many formerly conservative peeps say something like that: Nobody indoctrinated me, I just met the people who were supposed to be othered and it turns out they are cool.
For the record: Same at schools - nobody is saying you gotta be gay or trans, but apparently just telling kids that different people exist is a threat to their indoctrinated lifestyle.
Exactly it, you go out into the world and realize everything that you've been told about people is just made up fearmongering. Turns out the vast vast majority of people want to wake up, go to work, go home, work out (but they'd rather not but they convince themselves to do it), go to the grocery store, and watch TV. Everyone truly just wants to have a boring happy life.
But you ask a conservative and they'll claim they're aiming to bring down america or some other crazy shit. Nope. They want to get a frozen pizza for dinner and watch whatever's on TV, just like anyone else.
The regressive are working hard on eliminating quotas and content about minority groups so that their fragile followers don't need to interact with or even acknowledge minority populations in colleges.