Why LGBT acceptance happened so quickly

[andrewducker]

To start with, I want to qualify "quickly". For people involved in the struggle for decades it probably doesn't feel very quick at all. But observing the change over the last five years, it's been pretty staggering. I don't remember marriage equality even being asked as a question of the candidates at the last UK elections, and then suddenly it

Comments

[iainjcoleman]

Unfortunately not so likely to happen for trans people, as they are such a small proportion of the population.

[resonant]

Thank goodness for TV - if people can't connect personally with transfolk, we can have them connect emotionally with transpeople on TV. The increasing incidence of trans characters will, if nothing else, make cispeople act less weirdly when meeting a transperson in real life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transgender_characters_in_film_and_television

[abigail_n]

I read a discussion of this phenomenon a few months ago that was a lot less cheerful about the issue. Several commenters pointed out that gay marriage != gay rights, and that there has been some friction within the gay activism community about focusing its efforts so predominantly on this goal (someone made the observation that the shift to marriage and the traditional family structure came as a response to the AIDS epidemic, and that before it the gay lifestyle was often about rejecting the monogamous, paired-for-life paradigm

[cmcmck]

Acceptance?

When our present government came to power, the pushed so called 'equality' legislation left incomplete by the previous government into law and I actually LOST rights I'd gained under the Equal Opps and GR Acts.

Last year the Daily Mail hounded a trans woman teacher to her death by suicide and no one has ever answered for that crime even though the perpetrator is well known.

Acceptance?

On here may be different as I chose to associate with thoughtful, liberal minded people, but.....

No, not yet and I've been fighting the cause for forty years.

[andrewducker]

You're right - that really should have been LGB, because transgender rights still have a way to go.

[matrixmann]

Thought to say the same.
It may be right that the general acceptance for people who go fishing in the pond for their own kind or who say "I'm not happy with how Mother Nature created me, I want to turn things around!" has grown, but in practice, you often become confronted with typical stereotypes or with special expections of how you're going to act like.
Think, in general mass media have their fair share in this situation as they sensation-seekingly only present figures of these types which are glitzy persons which try to reach for spotlight. The casual rest becomes unnoticed besides all that.
And the problem is people do spend more time in front of their TV instead of reality, so they assume everyone who consideres himself to be part of one of these groups is like what they've seen on TV.
(Once dropped a longer note on that context in connection with the myths and the mocking word "Gayropa" that circulate around in Eastern Europe - because it needed to happen. http://matrixmann.livejournal.com/111747.html)

[cmcmck]

You make a fair point about media representation. Way too much of 'what everybody knows' about people like me is what they see on TV or in the papers.

[howlin_wolf_66]

Interesting analysis; thanks for drawing my attention to it. :-)