Skip Navigation
74 comments
  • 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.

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

    • Based on the wording you used, I think I know which cult you might be referring to. Yes there are several cults with that valuation to choose from, but my guess would have to be the US American frontier real-estate sex cult. It’s not really important but I just get a kick out of finding another refugee in the wild.

      For me, all it took was a few episodes of Carl Sagans Cosmos series on our grainy black and white tv late on Sunday evening. I didn’t meet any “out” sexual minorities of any kind till college but being introduced to the scientific world view really gave me something to hold on to during the worst years growing up queer.

      You never know what kind of influence your example can have. Glob bless Fred Rogers and Carl Sagan, otherwise I’d have had no examples of acceptance and openness.

      • That's the one!

        I was a good boy scout and the church had me putting up prop 8 signs all over the neighborhood in southern california. I had no idea what they were, something about people getting married which seems in consequential to me but that's how I earned my allowance.

        When I showed up to school that week one of the people in our friend group had a bunch of them and was tearing them up. When they noticed my irritation they told me the prop was to stop them from getting married which seemed backwards. Sure enough, that's what the law was and then I wanted to become a lawyer to stop that insufferable shit.

        I never became a lawyer, I work with lawyers more than enough.

  • 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.

    • PBS programs like Sesame Street were the only exposure I had to non-white cultures as a young kid as the city population where I went to schoole at the time was in the upper 90% white range and I mostly hung out with other rural kids because of proximity. A show with people just doing people things was a great way to normalize diversity.

    • Or at least allow other people to do their thing.

      I’m happy in my comfort zone, and am probably the last person to try something new. I’m not interested in leaving my comfort zone. I’m also not about to rip other people out of their comfort zone and harass them. Last time I checked, someone else eating food I never would or being trans when I’m not is no threat to me and my own world. Why would I ever try to threaten theirs?

      • Eh I'd still suggest it. I won't force people to but generally it's good to get out and try new things. You don't have to like them, but truly we get one life and you don't want to make it to the end and realize you didn't try anything. I like my rut too, but I still try to travel, experience new cultures, try that weird new food, talk to someone who's different from me, go to that risque show that I normally wouldn't, those are all life experiences that we can only do for so long and then it's just over.

        We go to work and follow our routine every day, a couple times a year try to push the boundaries a bit, you never know what you may like that's out there

    • I don't think it is quite so simple. A lot of folks go to very rural areas because they're mostly monocultured. Call it white flight I guess.

    • So put them on TV. Expose them that way. I myself am SUPER bitter about conservatives crying about "forced diversity" in media. I just want to shove it down their throats now. But representation is really really important. Just that my motives for it are based on resentment.

  • 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)

    • I think I'm in the same boat. I remember having conversations with my wife around 2015 about being somewhat frustrated about trans people's pronouns and wishing there was a better way to refer to them. I was very much in the "I don't care what they do" mindset like you mentioned. Looking back is so wierd. At the time I sort of considered myself a libertarian but didn't really get involved with politics. That changed so quickly with Trump (and specifically the United the Right rally). It really made me more politically aware. Anyways, like you I started watching ContraPoints. I think a friend recommended the "how to spot a fascist" video. It's hard to say if her content really had any effect on me becoming more trans-supportive than trans-tolerant (like you said) or if it was just a natural progression for me mulling stuff over in my brain over time. I look back on that conversation now and cringe. It wasn't outright transphobic but I'd definitely consider it a yellow flag hearing it from someone now.

    • Hey, as an NB, I'd appreciate it if you didn't use your experience to speak on mine. Being GNC isn't the same as NB, so please stop conflating the two. I'm closer to a binary trans person in my life than I am to a GNC cis person, so please don't speak in absolutes here. I am absolutely trans, I consider myself trans wholeheartedly, and anyone who says I'm not trans rightfully can fuck off. If you experience being non-binary in a way that's seemingly indistinguishable from being a GNC cis person, that's you. I'm not going to police how you identify, so don't do the same for the broader NB community.

      • That is valid, thank you for your response. I want to offer a sincere apology for causing any discomfort; I misunderstood GNC as an umbrella term under which NB falls, similar to how "queer" is an umbrella term for LGBTQIA+ in general. Now I understand that GNC is more a lifestyle rather than an identity, and not a superset as I initially thought.

        Regarding my own identity, I don't outwardly present as GNC, but despite having masc pronouns, being referred to as a "man" makes my skin crawl, and I'm not fond of having facial hair. I don't feel comfortable identifying as "trans", and as a counterexample, that would suggest not all NB are trans and thus it isn't a strict superset. However, this is just my personal experience and understanding, and I acknowledge that others might feel and experience their identities differently. I know there's a diverse range of experiences and identities within the NB and trans communities, and it isn't my place to define who should or should not identify as trans.

        Also for what it's worth, I'm not deeply engaged with NB communities, so my knowledge is lacking. Please correct me when I've used inappropriate language or expressed misunderstandings. I am here to learn and understand better. I appreciate your patience and willingness to correct my misunderstanding, and am glad I can be more sensitive and informed moving forward.

  • 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 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.

  • 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?)

74 comments