Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: What we are seeing is victories in the courts, victories in terms of every year.

There are more openly LGBTQ people elected.

But what I do want to say is that we are in a moment of retrenchment, where the idea of equal rights has become unsavory to a very powerful group of people.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to To The Contrary a discussion of news and social trends from a variety of perspectives.

American voters are more open to LGBT candidates than at any point in history, but perhaps only if the candidate quote acts straight and quote.

A recent study showed LGBT candidates true electability is still tightly bound to traditional rules of masculinity and femininity.

Despite this, hundreds of LGBT candidates are running for office at all levels this year.

Joining me this week are Dr.

Melissa Michelson, professor of political science at Menlo College, and Dr.

Jenn M. Jackson, assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.

Welcome to you both.

So let's start with a large question, which is, will we see a so-called rainbow wave of LGBT candidates winning office this year?

I don't know if we're going to see a wave because a wave implies a huge increase.

I don't think this is the year that Democrats are going to go out on a limb and dramatically increase the number of openly LGBTQ candidate that they're running for office.

This is a year when Democrats are kind of still licking their wounds from putting forward a black woman for president.

They want to make sure they win elections.

And unfortunately, that means that they're going to put forward traditional candidates, not necessarily out LGBTQ candidates.

And so I think we will see a lot of LGBTQ candidates out there.

And I think we will see a lot of them elected.

But I wouldn't expect any massive increase or wave of any sort.

I think this is the year that Democrats play it safe, and they don't push voters out of their comfort zone.

And to be clear, almost all out LGBTQ elected officials in this country are Democrats, and so that's why I'm saying this is about the Democrats, because nine out of ten out LGBT officials are Democrats.

Yeah.

I just think that it's important to emphasize the term openly.

Right.

I think that we often expect that if someone is queer or non-heterosexual, that we will know.

Right.

And so this is part of the reason why so many people have questions about if we've ever had a representation, and the truth is we have.

But it hasn't always been safe to be out or to be open about our identities.

And so what we will see is that even if there are elected officials who are non-heterosexual, who are queer, they may not tell people, they may not be out and open about it because it's just not a safe time to do so.

Well, are there people who've LGBTQ people who've run for office without pronouncing their identity and gotten any kind of threats, or had a problem running because of prejudice against LGBTQ people?

I mean, I think we— So to be clear, queer people and trans people have existed since the dawn of time.

And so, you know, these folks have worked really hard to unfortunately mask or pas or assimilate in some instances.

But I think the best way to think about this is actually what recently happened at the recent UFC fight, when after the fight, there was comments about Michelle Obama that were deeply transphobic.

Right?

And so Michelle Obama is not an elected official.

But what we do see is that the inclination toward hurling transphobic, homophobic slurs and tropes at people is universal.

It cuts all ways.

And so it's not that there's necessarily been non-heterosexua or queer folks who were not out, who experienced some type of harm or direct discrimination.

What it is is that the larger ecosystem in politics right now is unwelcoming toward folks who are not normative or traditionally gendered in sex.

Very interesting.

And why is that happening?

At a time where, at least on some level, Americans are also becoming more accepting of LGBTQ people in their lives, and more accepting of the fact that a certain percentage of the population has always been and will always be LGBTQ?

Well, I actually think we're seeing some decreases in acceptability of LGBT people, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle.

And you look at, for example, just attitudes towards same sex marriage between 1992 and 2024, support was increasing among Americans of all political partisanship.

But now recently, we've seen suppor start to drop among Republicans.

It is increasingly being used, particularly by Republican elected officials, as a culture war item, as a means of attacking Democrats and of riling people up, especially provoking or inciting fear, right?

Concern about their children, concern about fairness and sports, concerned about people being deceptive.

And, you know, as Dr.

Jackson mentioned there, even using this against folks who are themselves heterosexual and straight, not just Michelle Obama, but James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S.

Senate in Texas.

He is very much a straight, cisgender white man, but the Republican folk are throwing accusations of him of being transgender as a way of attacking him.

So it is now become something that is used politically as a weapon.

And because of that rhetoric, right, we are seeing support for LGBTQ rights, especially transgender rights, decreasing significantly among folks who identify as Republicans.

How are yo rationalizing in your own mind— and I'd like comments from each of you—about how, while the visible population of LGBTQ candidates and elected officials seems to be growing, or the country seem to be coming a bit more at ease, and at the same time, prejudice is going up against LGBT.

How do you deal with those two things happening at the same time?

You know, I think it's important when we say the country seems to be more accepting, we have to be very clear about cohort effects, right?

I think it's really important to note that millennials, Gen Zers, Gen Alphas are queerer tha their parents and grandparents.

That's just a fact, right?

We know that millennials have been on record as one of the queerest generations in history.

And so when we talk about this increasing acceptance, that doesn't mean that it's permeating some of those older generations.

We still have folks who are alive from the silent generation, you know, baby boomers.

And so it's not budging in those generations and also in genetics.

Right.

And so what we see is a retrenchmen in some of the elder generations when it comes to what they see as a kind of radical kind of shift in gender.

We have to always remember also, Project 2025 was very clear about the stances on gender, sexuality, transness, support for trans children, right?

Criminalizing even librarians and school teachers and school counselors for supporting transgender children.

And so while we are seeing this kind of increasing presenc of queer identities and LGBTQIA plus identities among younger cohorts of Americans, what we're also seeing is this rebuke, right, open rebuke toward those shift in an effort to kind of hold on to what folks see as traditional gender normativity.

So I don't necessarily think this is a moment where we can say that the country is moving in a particular direction.

What we can say is that there's a lot of polarizing ideas about how gender, sexuality, embodiment should emerge in everyday life, and folks are taking it to policy.

That's why there's so much anti-trans policy all over the country right now as well.

Well, but, you know, Trump has been in office now for a year and a half, getting closer to two years.

And clearly he's not supportive of LGBTQ candidates for office and such.

And the country seems to be pushing back against having sat and watched a generation of people pushing up against the barrier and pushing it farther to the left so that it became more acceptable for people, for, you know, non cisgendered people to run for office and to get into very public jobs.

How do you explain the two things happening at the same time?

I think we have to separate things out a little bit.

First of all, you know, Dr.

Jackson's exactly right.

Like a lot of this is about polarization.

And it's not just generations.

It's also different parts of the country.

Right?

Things that pla well here, where I am in Silicon Valley, are not necessarily going to be acceptable to, say, voters in Oklahoma, very different situations.

Right.

And especially based on the polarization or the political partisanship of a particular area, there's also an important distinction to be made between what is the most acceptable kind of LGBTQ candidate or politician which is a cis gender white man, and there is a gay, openly gay, cisgender white man in the Trump administration.

Scot Bessent is heading the Treasury.

So that kind of LGBTQ representation, Trump is okay with—not so much transgender people, non gender conforming people, right?

People who are part more of the and the plus part of the LGBTQ.

And so there's a distinction to be made here.

And just looking at who those out LGBTQ elected officials are in the United States, the bigges chunk of them, the overwhelming chunk of the is, again, white cisgender men.

And so there's a different way in which people respond to white, cisgender men who otherwise are heteronormative, right?

They played straight.

They have a family.

They, you know, they're not i your face with their queerness.

That's okay.

Right.

There's a lot of folks, including members of the Republican Party, who are just— who are okay with that kind of queerness, that kind of gay, but not so much comfortable with what we're seeing increasingly with the younger generations of pansexual, queer, gender fluid.

Right.

All the different parts of the rainbow, that for a lot of older Americans is very unsettling and uncomfortable.

And that's what we're seeing the culture war focus on, not so much nice gay and lesbian white people who have families and get married and act straight.

But the folks who are mayb pushing against other boundaries in ways that make Americans feel uncomfortable.

Absolutely.

And I also want to add, I think that you're absolutely right, Dr.

Michelson.

I think the regional differences really matter, right?

I also think that the question around why are these things happening at the same tim is a really important question.

It's the same, you know, underlying framework as to why the movement for Black lives emerged under the first Black president, right.

And what often happens is that there is this kind of— the polarization is also a result of resistance, right.

And what's happening in communities, grassroots organizing.

And we know that some of this kind of pendulum like shift toward anti-trans, anti-quee policy is in response to the era under the Obama administration that made being queer openly out openly trans, openly non-binary okay, right.

And so often we see these kind of shifts in resistance and these shifts in organizing around these issues under the very same presidents or administrations where sometimes we expect there to be kind of a more liberal, laissez faire moment of folk kind of living their best lives.

And so right now, this contingent you're seeing is coming from, you know, a shift in power.

And the folks who in power said we are no longer speaking about gender in these ways.

In fact, we will change policy to remove the word gender, to remove the word trans right, to stop speaking about women and to take away funding for research, right, that centers these folks.

And so this is not an issue, I think that is cut and dry, right?

Its deeply, deeply nuanced.

Well, did progressives, both inside and outside the LGBTQ community go—push too hard, go too far?

And that's why we're having the reaction against it, against LGBTQ people during the— I think the phrase push too hard is a loaded phrase.

It's the kind of phrase we heard a lot during, say, the black civil rights movement when white people said, I'm all for black rights, but not so fast.

I mean, I think it's an interesting way to phrase it.

Right?

Because you're telling a community you should wait to be treated equally.

We are not comfortable with this timeline.

You're rushing me.

I think it is— it is for sure a backlash, right, that when people demand to be treated as full human beings and full citizens and have their rights, that there is backlash.

And that's why we, you know, we have these phrases like two steps forward, one step back.

Of course there is backlash, but I— I am definitely—so I—yes, that is what is happening.

There's a backlash to peopl demanding to be treated fairly.

But when people say, oh, it's just that you're rushing me, you're moving too fast.

That's, that's twisting it in a way that I think is unfortunate.

Do you think there's a way to stifle discussion of moving political movements like this forward quickly, for the sake of making more progress, maybe?

And not— This is something that came up a lot in the fight for gay rights a couple of decades ago, where y'all might remember that Barney Frank, who was an openly gay member of Congress, agreed— Who recently died.

—to remove transgender people from the Equality Bill to say, let's get rights for gay and lesbian people and we'll come back for you transgender people.

Just chill.

And of course, it failed anyway.

And all it did was create resentment and divisions within the LGBTQ community.

Saying, oh, we'll we'll just push forward the more popular bits and then we'll come back for you less popular folks later weakens movements and generally undermines progress.

And we haven't seen it work.

So I think the lesson that we've learne from that from similar movements and say, the undocumented youth movement, where they tried to separate dreamers out and that failed.

The lesson for multiple marginalized communities over time has been, don't brea things up and go for baby steps.

You are stronger— We are stronger if we stick together and demand progress for everyone.

I completely agree and I want to take it back even further, right?

I draw my student attention to this all the time.

The Equal Rights Amendment still has not passed.

Right.

This is something that has been pushed for, what, 100 years?

You know, and I tell people in my class, Im telling young people that when we think about the potential of movements, right?

And we look back at what we've seen, the splintering always happe when there's a faction of folks who want to take a short term, iterative approach and the folks who are seen as radical.

This happened in the Women's Rights Movement.

We saw a splintering right of ideological stances, and black women came in and said, hey, are we not women?

Do we not actually fall into this conversation?

And when white women go the access to the vote in 1920, it wouldn't be another 50 o so years until black Americans, and specifically black women, also got that right to vote.

So it has never actually sustained coalitions.

It has never actually moved us toward the goal.

And there's two thing I just want to add to this, too.

We said the LGBT community, and I don't think that there is an LGBT community, right.

I think that we have people calling the Alphabet Mafia, right, the Rainbow Coalition.

But the truth of the matter is, and Dr.

Kaila Adia Story writes about this in her most recent book, The Rainbow Aint Never Been Enuf that, you know, creating coalitions across the LGBT Is and A's is quite hard, right Because most of the time people don't understand that some of those identities are sexualities, and some of those are gender identities, right?

You can be trans and not fall into the rest of the letters, right?

And so those experiences are not homogenous.

So there's an issue here also of legibility, you know.

For gay and lesbian folks who can often assimilate into mass society in ways that are, you know, kind of easy, right?

A lot of them were fighting for gay marriage around 2008, 2009.

Right.

They were fighting for that access while there were black, queer and trans teens on the streets who were being ousted from their households, fired from their jobs and not able to feed themselves.

And they said, my issue isnt marriage.

I need a place to live and a way to survive, right?

So there's always been these different and competing concerns within these communities, and that's somewhere where we also lose, when we flatten everybody's experiences.

So, I'd like to hear from each of you.

What do we do with this or what do you do with this?

What does the movement do with this?

Does it stop fighting so hard or keep fighting but pull back a little bit?

Does it not listen to any of this stuff and just keep pushing forward, as if we were still living in a politically very progressive era, which clearly we're not under, you know, under the current administration.

What advice would you give to advocates right now?

I would never tell people to pull back.

I would always tell people to keep fighting.

I think every negotiation is improved by having a strong position.

Every fight for recognition and rights is strengthened by having the public on your side.

And so if folks continue to push, if folks continue to demand that they be treated equally and that they be given a way to feed themselves and have a place to live and to have their humanity recognized, progress will be made.

I think, you know, these thing take a really long time, right?

Every rights movement in the United States has taken multiple decades to make progress.

And there are always— there's always backlash and there's always backward steps.

But then over time, there is progress.

And so the only way to get to where folks want to be is to keep pushing, even if the progress is slow.

I don't think I would recommend that anyone pull back.

But to keep pushing, as you say, doesn't that slow progress dow because it gives the opponents more right to fight because they see their position being winnowed down?

I think it's important that when we talk about grassroots movements and the fact that most of them are political outsiders, we have to separate that from the political insiders who are actively working to tamp down those movements.

And so when we think about the work of young people, you know, young black, brown, migrant, disabled peopl who have always done this work, right, this—the the efforts to gain equal citizenship have existed since, you know, the era of slavery.

And so when people talk about the Black Lives Matter movement or the movement for black lives, many of us in political science and black studies argue that the movement for black lives started many, many, many years ago.

Right.

And so what I want to draw attention to, I think now, is the fact that these movements and the work that they've done has only transformed.

It hasn't recently emerged, and they're not pushing any differently.

So in the civil rights era, right.

We know that one of the greatest articulations of mass movement was the Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted for over a year, in an era when they didn't even have Google or cell phone to text one another, they didn't even have fax machines, right?

And so they were able to orchestrate this mass movement against the public transportation system using their own resources.

So they've always pushed this har and they're always supposed to.

But what I do want to say is that we are in a moment of retrenchment, where the idea of equal rights has become unsavory to a very powerful group of people, and that's where we should rest the onus of this issue.

So where do you both see the next steps as being, to continue pushing for the same rights as have been pushed for now, for a couple of decades, and very slow little pieces of progress have been made, but it's not moving as quickly as it might otherwise, if the leaders of the movement used a different strategy.

That' an interesting way to phrase it.

I don't know if a different strategy would move things forward more quickly.

I think what we are seeing is victories in the courts, victories in terms of every year.

There are more openl LGBTQ people elected, more LGBTQ people being considered a viable candidates for president.

I mean, the talk about Pete Buttigieg is—that's groundbreaking that it's even being considered whether or not he does well in the primaries and/or gets elected president.

Just the fact that his candidacy is being seriously debated, that an openly gay man could be the president of the United States.

That's progress.

But at the same time, you can't ask people to stop fighting when it's their humanity on the line.

There was a decision in Idaho about access to bathroom by nonbinary transgender people.

If you were out in public and you need a restroom, you should be allowed to go to the restroom.

That's not something you can just say to people like, well, just wait.

And people might not know that way back, way back before any of us were alive, women couldn't go to the restroom in public.

And that was a way of policing the behavior and the movement of women, because they'd have to go home to use the restroom.

You know, there's a distinction here to be made between people fighting for their basic humanity and their rights to live openly and to engage in public life along with everyone else.

And there's the item we initially started talking about, which is gettin folks elected to public office.

And I do think that we're going to see continued progress on that, maybe only on the Democratic side, but more and more folks are openly running and getting elected.

I don't see any reason why that will stop.

I completely agree.

I want to thank you both fo for your insights on this topic.

That's it for this edition of To The Contrary, let's keep talking on social media, including X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

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