Cultural Transgression Variability

A research paper published in mid-2025 suggests that there’s greater support for gay rights (including same-sex unions) in Western cultures but less support for trans rights and gender marker changes, while the opposite tends to be true in the rest of the world (where same-sex unions are less likely to be legal and socially acceptable, but transgender people are relatively more likely to be accepted and gender marker changes are relatively more likely to be legal).

This research was based on two rounds of surveys of people from 23 different countries, and the researchers posit that this distinction might be the result of how queer rights rose to prominence in the Western world, these movements often fronted or perceptually focused on (in the press and in legal contexts) white, middle-class, gender-conforming gay men.

That perception isn’t accurate in a more holistic sense. Many women have been fundamental to gay rights movements across the Western world, as have many non-middle-class people, non-gender-conforming people, and so on.

But the folks who have been positioned as representatives or figureheads of these movements, and who have come to represent milestones along the path toward the legalization of gay marriage in many countries in particular, have tended to have those aforementioned attributes. And the theory is that this has made the pursuit of gay rights in the Western world a somewhat easier lift than the pursuit of transgender rights because of latent positive biases often enjoyed by white, gender-conforming, middle-class (or wealthier) men.