Before I graduated high school, I remember visiting a friend at her dad’s house (let’s call him Bill), and the topic of homosexuality came up. Being the 60-something-year-old conservative Christian that he was, Bill expressed his disgust and hatred for what he believed to be one of the most punishable sins – you know, up there with adultery and child molestation. While I did grow up in Utah County and understood that most of the immediate population considers homosexuality to be wrong, I hadn’t really had to deal with much openly-expressed hatred. I thought society was beyond that. I told my parents the next morning about Bill’s seemingly irrational aversion to homosexuality, and it started a conversation about generational gaps in perception and the history of homosexual intolerance. And, more recently, my dad and I have revisited this conversation with regard to how history seems to be repeating itself with the transgender movement gaining traction.
I think it’s obvious that, in addition to traditional religious influences, society’s historical dislike of homosexuality has stemmed from ignorance and fear. And to break through that it’s had to face homosexuality head-on. Since the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969, the gay community and its supporters have really come together to show society that homosexuality exists in a prominent way and needs to be acknowledged humanely and effectively to ensure equality now and for future generations.
According to NORC, the independent research organization based at the University of Chicago, the late 1980s have since become representative of a major turning point in society’s perception and acceptance. Thanks to activists like Harvey Milk, the first openly gay individual elected into public office in California, and many other public figures who have come out as gay or supportive of gay individuals, society as a whole favors homosexual equality for the first time in human history. We now live in a world where the headquarters for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in the same city that is run by a lesbian female, Jackie Biskupski, and nobody thinks twice about her sexual orientation. From what I’ve experienced, for most people—gay or straight—homosexuality is as regular and acceptable as heterosexuality, and I think such a widespread and dramatic shift in societal perception over a short period of time is incredible.
But with the transgender community gaining attention, society has had to review, once again, how to accept a minority group with actions and beliefs which may be new, foreign and difficult to understand for a large number of people. The transgender movement may be, to our generation, what the gay movement was to our parents. And to get through this we’re going to have to address the issue—play with policies, push some boundaries, make some people a little uncomfortable and essentially force confrontation—in order to get people to acknowledge and accept transgender individuals the way we’ve grown to accept homosexuals. The gay community has paved the way and taken a lot of the hits for groups that fall into sexual minorities. This is a great time for transgender people to start a movement, and over time people will learn to accept them for who they are.