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Notes -
And now, to add another data point to the ongoing motte argument about "are people actually sick of woke?"
Social Conservatism in U.S. Highest in About a Decade
So reads the title of this Gallup report, which I have to admit warmed my cold dead once-a-libertarian heart. People identifying as "very conservative" or "conservative" made up 38% of respondents, while those identifying as "liberal" or "very liberal" made up 29%. This is now the second year in a row more people have identified as conservative than the previous, which is enough to constitute a "trend" according to my old stats professor. Cue celebratory balloons.
Most, but not all, of the increase is due to a much smaller percentage of Republicans self-identifying as moderates (32% in 2021 to 18% in 2023) but Independents are trending more conservative as well (up to 29% identifying as conservative from 24% in 2021).
It also appears that the long-repeated and sometimes despaired-of switch to conservatism among millennials is finally happening.
The 30-49 age bracket had a 13 point move towards conservatism, compared to the only 11 point shift in the 50-64 year olds. But even the Zoomers are getting more conservative, as the 18-29 year olds saw a 6 point shift.
Economic conservatism also ticked up but it's the social conservatism that's really interesting.
This won't reverse institutional capture, it won't stop Biden from hanging a pride flag on the white house (which could not look more like the flag of a conquering nation if it tried) but it's a shift. It could simply be a natural reaction to Democratic supremacy in the government, but the historical numbers don't track to party changes. I personally think it's probably just the right becoming more right, and no longer identifying as independent, but it's interesting none the less.
How much of this is just a leftward shift in the definitions of social "liberal" and "conservative" rather than a rightward shift in beliefs themselves?
20 years ago, "social liberal" mostly just meant supporting abortion, gay marriage, and teaching evolution in schools. Today it seems for many the term is linked to positions with less popular support, like defunding the police, reparations, drag shows, etc.
That’s surely part of it, but it also seems like Americans just got a bit less trans accepting, too. Wouldn’t shock me if it extended to other parts of the LGBT issues.
When do you think the golden age of trans acceptance was? People are far more trans-accepting than they were ever were - it is just that the normie majority have responded to the increasing noise level by changing their view from "Whatever" to "Don't trans my daughter".
Trans acceptance circa Very Special Episodes of shows like Night Court and The Court and The IT Crowd and The West Wing and Sex and the City was basically 100% accepting but also viewed as exceptionally rare.
Trans acceptance tracks less with gay acceptance or Black liberation than it does with the status of minority groups in the United States like Chinese and Muslim immigrants: accepted easily but haltingly when they were rare, hated feared and excluded when they started to become common.
Yes, the thing about gay rights movements is that everyone (even in very conservative cultures in socially conservative times) knew of gay people in their community, in their family. You can ask grandparents or other old relatives or friends; even in little towns in Iran it’ll be village gossip. It was no surprise that gay people existed or that Bob from the office was gay, and it wasn’t even a huge surprise that your son or daughter was gay, whether or not you approved of it. People used to regularly have 6+ kids, too, so it really wasn’t unusual to have a gay child, sibling or uncle/aunt.
By contrast, very, very few Americans even in cosmopolitan progressive circles knew anyone trans before about 2010. The only people who did were those in very queer circles, the tiny number of doctors who worked with transgender patients and the men who frequented transwomen prostitutes, who presumably largely kept it to themselves. Trans representation on 90s shows like ‘Friends’ may have been ‘tolerant’, but it was also read by most of the audience as a quirky big city joke thing.
Even to the extent that someone might have encountered a trans person in their lives pre-2010, it was fairly uncommon to know they were trans, especially if you weren't good at clocking people. The framework of this as equivalent to the Witness Protection Program -- completely cutting ties with one's past life and community, moving across the country -- isn't exactly what was going on, but it was present enough to get pushback as recent as 2009. Transitioning-in-place was much less common, especially in rural and suburban areas, due to the relative difficulty of medical practitioners doing these services, the physical difficulties involved in many of them, and a variety of economic pressures.
It's probably also worth mentioning the vastly increased prominence of transmen qua transmen. The relative paucity of them as a group sometimes reflected data gathering problems -- most studies depended on that required legal name changes and/or bottom surgery that remain less common among transmen even today -- but it was pretty common for people, even people much into the broader queer or gender-nonconforming world, to not really have consideration of the category as a possible thing until the late-00s, barring very specific communities.
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate their ability to figure out "mysteries" like this irl because they don't go through life thinking anything is a mystery. It's only after you are tipped off to examine things that a mystery appears.
Prior to trans prominence, there was rarely any reason to doubt anyone's sex, and so you could rely on the most gross and simplistic shortcuts. Long hair, dress, makeup -- that's a woman. Perhaps an unfortunate looking woman.
One of the great tragedies of trans prominence is the way it leads to false-positives on "clocking" people. It's the most obvious demonstration of how trans prominence reifies gender norms. Forty years ago a middle aged woman with masculine features would never dream that she had to worry people would think she had a penis.
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
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