this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I feel like something weird happened in regards to common perception of trans people, maybe around the 80s. I mean specifically in America and in popular conception since I know German fascists burned gender research books.
Maybe I'm wrong but it seemed like there was more of like a curiosity about trans people? I'm thinking of mainly newspaper headline or the Ed Wood movie Glen or Glenda. Or how the musician Wendy Carlos was trans in the 70s and everyone seemed cool with her.
Does anyone here know more about this? There was a different vibe with gender nonconformance, like I know there was transphobia and the Stonewall riot happened because of cops arresting trans women, but also it seems like average people in the public didn't care as much as now
It seems like there was more hatred directed toward gay people and now it's flipped.
Could have also been the average uninformed person viewed trans people in an individual lens, as in, one person doing something unique to them. It might have been seen like an odd, curious and interesting thing to be rather than now, where more people have recognized trans people are a fundamental inherent aspect of society. That seems to be the brunt of transphobia, keeping trans people marginal, unaccepted, or dead. Keeping trans people out of society's fabric entirely.
There was the AIDS crisis which wiped out an entire generation of LGBT+ people and was accompanied by a major scare campaign. Since a lot of Trans people (possibly most non-closeted ones) at the time were sex workers it hit them even harder.
In the late 80s-90s things got better, to the extent that a Trans person was in some ways considered less controversial than being gay, if they were otherwise socially conforming, but the rise of "Moral Majority" types and the general right wing push towards conservative sexual mores after Clinton's shitbaggery finally managed to put an end to that.
You can see it in the change in problematic sitcom vibes from "Hahaha Male lead's best high school friend is now a hot girl, but she still loves football and beer and they get along great! Funny and heartwarming and let's not look too hard at what the writer's fetishes might be!" to "I accidentally dated a trans woman and now I might be gay, how could she trick me like that, they might trick you, the audience too! I will now nobly restrain myself from violence but still shame and humiliate the trans person! This is also not the writer's barely contained but somehow much worse fetish."