It’s interesting that this is based on 2020 numbers. The last 3 years have seen a huge wave of hatred and escalating real world violence against queer people of all sorts. More anti-lgbt political actions have been taken in the last 3 years in America than I can remember at all before then. This wave coinciding with a rise in people identifying as LGBT makes me wonder if, unintentionally, this has been driving a boom in a wider understanding of LGBT people and education of LGBT rights.
I feel like more people are aware of who queer people are and what it means to be gay or bi or trans or ace than ever before. Awareness has spread nearly globally, and there is a growing public opinion, especially among young people, that queer identity should be celebrated. It’s shocking to see the growth in such plain numbers because the hate campaigns against us obfuscate just how much public acceptance of queer people has grown over the last 5 years. This, in turn, has caused fascists to adopt the narrative that queer people are taking over society, justifying itself in part on how much more common queer acceptance has become.
It makes me feel a sort of cautious optimism. Like inevitably more and more otherwise neutral cishet people are seeing queerphobia and anti-LGBT rights movements as wrong. The association of anti-LGBT movements with MAGA and open fascism and fascists like Ron DeSantis may be to some extent making more people pro-LGBT rights. As there are more openly queer people, thusly more people know someone who is queer than ever before. I think that is also probably encouraging more people to openly be themselves and live openly as LGBT people. I think there is some cause for hope that the combination of these various factors may be early indicators of a drastic shift in Western public opinion. Whether or not that will pan out to genuine political change is impossible to tell. For the time being LGBT rights are still very much under attack, with little signs of the Republicans (and all other conservatives and fascists) changing their agenda.
FWIW, I might have stayed oblivious of my own repressed gender identity for much longer if it wasn’t for all the hate-mongering keeping the subject in the news and making it harder to stop thinking about. So that’s at least one anecdotal example that fits such a trend.
It’s interesting that this is based on 2020 numbers. The last 3 years have seen a huge wave of hatred and escalating real world violence against queer people of all sorts. More anti-lgbt political actions have been taken in the last 3 years in America than I can remember at all before then. This wave coinciding with a rise in people identifying as LGBT makes me wonder if, unintentionally, this has been driving a boom in a wider understanding of LGBT people and education of LGBT rights.
I feel like more people are aware of who queer people are and what it means to be gay or bi or trans or ace than ever before. Awareness has spread nearly globally, and there is a growing public opinion, especially among young people, that queer identity should be celebrated. It’s shocking to see the growth in such plain numbers because the hate campaigns against us obfuscate just how much public acceptance of queer people has grown over the last 5 years. This, in turn, has caused fascists to adopt the narrative that queer people are taking over society, justifying itself in part on how much more common queer acceptance has become.
It makes me feel a sort of cautious optimism. Like inevitably more and more otherwise neutral cishet people are seeing queerphobia and anti-LGBT rights movements as wrong. The association of anti-LGBT movements with MAGA and open fascism and fascists like Ron DeSantis may be to some extent making more people pro-LGBT rights. As there are more openly queer people, thusly more people know someone who is queer than ever before. I think that is also probably encouraging more people to openly be themselves and live openly as LGBT people. I think there is some cause for hope that the combination of these various factors may be early indicators of a drastic shift in Western public opinion. Whether or not that will pan out to genuine political change is impossible to tell. For the time being LGBT rights are still very much under attack, with little signs of the Republicans (and all other conservatives and fascists) changing their agenda.
FWIW, I might have stayed oblivious of my own repressed gender identity for much longer if it wasn’t for all the hate-mongering keeping the subject in the news and making it harder to stop thinking about. So that’s at least one anecdotal example that fits such a trend.