It felt for a few years that things were looking up. No one really cared when I transitioned, people were largely supportive.
Since 2016 though, things have been in a rapid decline. I’m exhausted, I feel like I have a target on my back, and I’m terrified.
I want to move but the economy is crashing and I have some semblance of stable work now. Not enough to save for a move, not enough to get above water on the debt my ex left me, but enough that hopefully I’ll be able to keep paying rent and keep food in my fridge.
I just can’t imagine another three years of this.
I may be crazy, but yeah. I think things will eventually swing back to people not being giant shit bags about things that aren’t their business.
The problem is when, and how much struggle between. I don’t think it’ll be long on the scale of things because once awareness hits a given threshold where the abstract becomes personalized, humanized, it’s a lot harder for hate to keep going.
I’m fairly confident that the us and most of Europe had hit that threshold. That should be enough to keep things from regressing totally, which means an eventual resurgence of acceptance and integration into societal mores.
Not that there is ever likely to be an absence of bigotry, and there won’t ever be an absence of ignorance, much less outright “sociopathy” where people actively seek a target they can hate and abuse.
Social progress is rarely linear. There’s fits and starts until things start chugging forward steadily. It was like that with pretty much every rights movement I know of, so I don’t see why trans rights should be an exception.