Greatest Hit: Public Perception Transformed - Post-Obergefell Queer Perspectives w/ Dr. Andrew Flores

**Originally released April 27, 2022**

Get ready for a journey into understanding the evolution of public opinion on the queer and trans communities post the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling. My guest, Dr. Andrew Flores - an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at American University and a visiting scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA - lends us his extensive research on public sentiment and its impact on the queer community. Together, we tackle the intricate issues of legislative threats, marriage equality, and the emotional complexity of the queer community's relationship with the government.

We have an enlightening discussion on how mass media representation has influenced public opinion about the queer and trans communities. The contrasting approaches of Hollywood and the Republican Party towards queer representation provide an interesting perspective on the power of media in shaping societal attitudes. We also delve into how policy changes can impact queer mental health, underscoring the queer community's resilience in the face of numerous challenges. 

As we round up our episode, the discussion takes a lively turn towards individual actions and their power to drive systemic change. We highlight the toll of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation on children and emphasize the crucial role of both legislative and individual actions in creating a more inclusive society. This insightful conversation, although acknowledging the grim current political climate, manages to end on a positive note, affirming our strong belief in a more hopeful and inclusive future. Tune in for a riveting exploration of these critical issues, painted with a lens of positivity, resilience, and strength.

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**Artwork: Dovi Design
**Music: Joystock

Transcript

Andrew: 0:00

That is the change that you're seeing from in the current politics is that the current politics are happening all at the legislative level and among the political elites. So, yes, it's getting talked about in the news media, yes, people are still talking about it, but people are not being as much put to a vote on trans rights as they were around marriage equality. And I think that change in tactic and strategy is intentional that if you force voters to vote on these issues, that they actually have to consider them more than if it happens at the state house.

Shawn: 0:44

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. I want to take you back to an earlier moment in time. In actual time, it wasn't that long ago, but it feels like a lifetime ago. So close your eyes, take a breath and relax. It's June 26, 2015, and the Supreme Court has just dropped its ruling in Obergefell v Hodges, finding that the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution protects a right to same-sex marriage. It was a moment of joy, complicated as it was, for in that moment, we had won something, but we also wrestled with the idea that we were celebrating inclusion by a government that didn't really want us, and we were struggling over an open debate within the queer community about conforming to patriarchal society's idea of marriage and family, and there was also a certain amount of humiliation in being grateful for something that the government was conferring on us Frankly, not the right of a government to give or deny human dignity. Despite all that, it felt like the tide was turning for some of us anyway, so we celebrated, but I'll be completely honest, following that decision in 2015, I held my breath for a short period of time to see what kind of reaction there would be if there would be some significant backlash and after a few months I relaxed a bit. Republicans seemed to accept the decision as the final word on gay marriage, and public opinion polling consistently showed high support amongst voters and that support was bleeding into other queer-related issues, notably trans issues. But in about 2019, early 2020, republicans started focusing on trans-related issues bathroom bills, who could play on sports teams, etc. And over the past couple of years this has intensified. This year alone, over 400 anti-queer bills have been introduced in state houses across the country and the Lions share of them target trans folks and drag performers. In some ways, this is confounding because, by and large, public opinion of queer-related issues remains high. So why are Republicans doing this?

Shawn: 2:58

To help me understand that, today I'm talking to Dr Andrew Flores. He's an assistant professor of government at American University and a visiting scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA. He's published extensively on public opinion and the queer community and he also researches hate crimes and violence committed against the queer community. And we talk about all of these things Then. tay tuned after the interview when I check in with friend of the pod, Justin Hentges.

Shawn: 3:26

You might remember him from a couple of prior episodes of Deep Dive. He's a glass half full kind of personality and I'm a glass half empty, and sometimes I've got my head so buried in the worst shit that humanity has to offer that I need someone like Justin to remind me that it's not all that bad. So I'm checking in with him to, you know, remind me that the world is a wonderful place, full of wonderful people, as always. If you like this episode, or any episode, please feel free to give it a like and follow it on your favorite podcast platform and follow Deep Dive on Instagram at Deep Dive with Shawn, and YouTube at Deep Dive with Shawn C Fettig. All right, let's do a deep dive, d Flores. Thanks for being here.

Andrew: 4:15

How are you? I'm doing well. The weather in DC is great.

Shawn: 4:20

Are you in like a cherry blossom season?

Andrew: 4:24

Actually that just ended. So we're kind of in this unique moment where the weather is well, today is going to be really hot like the 80s high 80s, but it's kind of 60s to 70s low humidity.

Shawn: 4:39

Let's dig into this. So over the past few years there's been, you know, increased interest in studying the queer community, and particularly the trans community, I think, in ways that have been largely overlooked in past, and you have a really deep bench here. A lot of the existing and emerging literature and research is really coming from you. So, especially at a time when the queer community, and again particularly the trans community, is really under threat legislatively, educationally, socially, physically I'm really excited to have you here and to talk to you about this. I guess this is where I want to start. There are a lot of ways that public opinion can be influenced on any given issue, but relative to the queer community, you've studied a handful of ways and I'm wondering if, first, you could help us understand how public opinion in this area has evolved over time and then what seemed to be the main determinants driving any shifts or changes in public opinion.

Andrew: 5:33

Those are great questions and first thank you for having me.

Andrew: 5:36

So there are only so many issues and populations where you've seen, over time, massive opinion change on a scale, such as issues relating to lesbian and gay rights, same-sex marriage and possibly though at a caveat, possibly with the trans community, and that has actually baffled scholars for quite a bit of time, because most of the time, people don't expect public opinion to shift in such rapid ways over the course of maybe even a decade.

Andrew: 6:15

Take marriage equality, for instance, as one clear example. Back in 2008, 2009, if you were to read the scholarship or talk to political scientists and other scholars of public opinion at the time, the needle wasn't moving, attitudes were quite not on the favor of marriage equality and there were few people who would prognosticate that attitudes were going to change or change at the rate they did. And so of course we fundamentally ask why and of course, any phenomena there's going to be multiple levers that get pushed and pooled in terms of explaining that change in mass opinion. But there's a couple key shifts that I think are important to note there, and then I'll talk about what we're seeing currently on trans rights. So with marriage equality, broadly speaking, opinion change in the mass public only really happens between two ways. One is that older generations that may have a different point of view are no longer part of society and therefore so they die.

Andrew: 7:25

Yes, that's a good question, and younger generations that may have a different point of view enter into the age of majority and are now members of the voting public, and so that change, though should be a gradual change right, it's something that should be just inertia of society, and, in fact, I have talked to political strategists back in like the 2010s and because they saw the patterns of my age around LGBTQ rights and marriage equality, but sometimes they just recommended just wait and you'll get the majority with you, because the younger generation is far more open to questions around marriage equality than the older generations are, and that, of course, frustrates advocates, because waiting is not necessarily what they want to do, and so there are this like well, how else can we move the needle? And that's the other lever of opinion change is that, as opposed to waiting for populations to shift, you actually try and strategize around. How can you actually reach people and change their minds? And there's some good evidence to suggest that, around marriage equality, that there is a portion of the variation around attitude change that was connected to generational replacement, but then there is a portion of that attitude change and a significant portion that is attributable to people changing their minds, and so what does that, and I'm just going to point to a few, because I think you'll ask me about other things in the future.

Andrew: 8:59

One of the major levers of change, of course, was the ability of queer people to be in a position in which they are able to live their own selves openly to people who otherwise might not know someone who is queer. And this goes back to one of the strategies or one of the first understandings about what reduces prejudice in society. Gordon L Port wrote a book called the Nature of Prejudice, and he talked about what can reduce prejudices in society, and one of the core parts of that was being able to know and interact and be in a situation with someone who is different than you, and that you can find some connection, some ways in which yourself and someone who you may see as the other becomes far less scary, per say. And so we saw in the early 90s to the 2000s, a rise in the number of people who report that they knew someone who was lesbian or gay, and that increase corresponded with the additional increases that we saw in feelings towards lesbian and gay people and towards marriage, equality and other LGBTQ rights issues, and so that's one part of the story.

Andrew: 10:21

Another part of the story is, of course, that there is an active LGBTQ movement that you know strategized around how to communicate the rights and equality for LGBTQ people and there was a period of time where the communications, particularly around marriage equality, kind of focused on, like, the rights and benefits and the equality factors that kind of go into granting marriage equality to same-sex couples, and that shifted in the 2012s where there was a more attention to the emotional and values based aspects around what marriage means to society and there was a shift in how that got communicated to the public.

Andrew: 11:08

So the marriage equality movement did a bunch of, you know, strategic communications. You do a bunch of research before you put an ad out to the public and in these, like focus groups, they would ask these cisgender, heterosexual individuals, why do gay people or same-sex couples want to get married? And they learned from this focus group conversations that they said, oh yeah, well, they want to get married because they want the benefits you know and the rights that marriage gets them, which is interesting because that is exactly the communications the marriage equality movement was kind of saying. You know that I used to remember off the top of my head the number of rights and benefits, federal rights and benefits. You know, because that was like a talking point, you know, and it was 1800 or something.

Andrew: 11:56

Something like that. Yeah, and then the focus group administrator asked why do you kind of get married? And the respondent or one of the participants said well, I want to get married because I love someone. And they fundamentally did not see the overlap between why maybe a same-sex couple might want to get married outside of the rights and benefits but because of love, and why people of different sex couples might want to get married, and so that led them toward this idea of, well, we have to find people where they are and communicate about, you know, the meaning of marriage for same-sex couples as being something that is quite similar to that of those of different sex couples, and that kind of led to a transformation in the communication strategy on marriage equality. And while the evidence-based per se is not overly conclusive whether or not that strategy was 100% successful, I do think it kind of acknowledged that strategic communications needs to consider both the cognitive you know, thinking side of a person, as well as the emotional and values connections that also go into how people form their attitudes and how people might approach issues in a different way.

Andrew: 13:16

The third part and I'll credit my fellow political scientist, jeremiah Garretzen has been the way in which queer representation has changed in mass entertainment and media, that there are gay characters on TV, that there is this opportunity for people who live in various parts of the United States are capable of, you know, seeing some version of queer representation, and that that type of representation has changed over time.

Andrew: 13:50

There has been, you know, in the 80s there was the gay character who maybe only was on one episode of a TV show or was afflicted with HIV or AIDS, but that has changed.

Andrew: 14:04

There has been positive representation.

Andrew: 14:07

My colleague Jeremiah, he also kind of provides kind of connective tissues between what does that representation mean and how did that also kind of relate to the motivation for queer people living in suburbia or rural environments to come out?

Andrew: 14:25

And so there's this interconnected web of you know the way that culture changes and the way that people can be influenced by that culture and therefore kind of communicate kind of their own identities to their families and their close friends. That can also change these minds. So to move forward to trans rights and the current political debate, because this is now where we are, one thing I'll say is that the opinion change around trans rights is uneven, that we've seen so far that there's not as much as any data points going back in time, but there has been some change and there's been some debate about whether or not, say, the contact hypothesis operates in a similar way with transgender people as it does with lesbian and gay people, though I think now the evidence base is kind of far more supportive of the idea that knowing someone who is transgender does lead to a positive shift and say, their attitudes towards transgender people and transgender rights.

Shawn: 15:26

So actually there are two things that you touched on and we can actually circle back to digging in some more of this public opinion and public support related to trans rights. But there are two things that you touched on that I do want to dig into a little bit. And the first is so you brought up depictions of folks on TV or in the entertainment industry, and this is something that I spoke to Ann Thomas about a couple of weeks ago. She's the founder of Transgender Talent Management Company in Hollywood, so she and I discussed this a little bit, but I want to get your take on it because you've studied this.

Shawn: 15:55

So we are living through I guess I don't know if this is the best characterization of this, but a quote unquote interesting period of time when we examine public opinion of the queer community and particularly the trans community, in that we really have two influencers with divergent approaches to the community, and I'm talking here on one side we have Hollywood in the entertainment industry, and then on the other side we have politicians, and really specifically the Republican Party, that are taking divergent approaches here. So Hollywood seems to be leaning into positive depictions of queer folks, and that's happening at the same time that politicians or the Republican Party is really denigrating the community. So how do you expect that this might influence public opinion, and in what ways? That's a good question.

Andrew: 16:40

I'll start with the politicians first and then I'll move into the Hollywood question. Classic model of how people get their attitudes around political matters and social questions is that if you have a party identification, if you kind of see yourself as a part of one team and the leaders of that team, so the politicians, the political elites, as we like to say, in Polly's eye if they start position taking and sticking out where the party stands on an issue, more likely than not many members of the mass public who identify with that party will similarly fall in line. Because yet, imagine, people are very busy people, right, they have to deal with getting their children to school, working with people on their day-to-day lives, planning dinners. They're not necessarily thinking about politics all that much. And so, to appreciate the complexity of everybody's lives, when you ask them about politics they're going to kind of think about well, I don't really consider transgender people or transgender rights all that much. But I know what my party is saying about this issue and therefore I know where I might stand on this issue. And there was a really good paper written by my good friend Phil Jones at the University of Delaware that showed empirically the development of both the Republican and Democratic party elite kind of sticking out their claims around transgender rights where at one point in time there wasn't much information, there wasn't much of a clear where does the party stand. And then, as time went forward, and if you look at our current climate and political politics at the state level and at some degree at the national level, the parties have clearly taken two different sides on this issue. And if you look at mass opinion, you see that among those that were the most politically informed, that they started to polarize on transgender rights first, and then now we see that even more broadly, the partisans have taken clear and distinctive views on these issues. Now, of course, this is all probabilistic, so that means there are, of course, individuals who are Republicans and are pro-trans rights and there are people who are probably Democrats and are anti-trans rights, but this is what we observe, say, on average. So now to the second component, the entertainment media.

Andrew: 19:19

I think it's important that when we think about social topics, particularly around LGBTQ topics, that we need to consider kind of what's going on in the ether of society, that is broader than just what's going on in the domain of politics. Some historians have actually I'm thinking of Mary Bernstein specifically, have written articles that kind of had said that if you were a historian of LGBTQ politics and policy and if you only focused on the political gains that the LGBTQ movement has made over the course of time, your evaluation of those gains may actually say that there has been some progress, but really not much. And she argues and I agree with her that a broader scope of social change needs to kind of be considered. And so she says look at culture, look at cultural change. That is not the same thing as policy change. And in that viewpoint then you have to think about what is going on in culture, what is going on in music, in mass entertainment, in representation of trends and queer people on TV. And if you look at those things and if you really evaluate them, you might find that there are elements of opinion change that are happening because the culture has changed and that change is kind of operating through entertainment media in various ways. And of course there's always a chicken and the egg question about kind of is entertainment responding to the demands of society or is society responding to the changes of the media content they're consuming? And I think of course there is argument and evidence to kind of say that there is this kind of feedback loop going on there.

Andrew: 21:10

But there has been research has been sort of mixed as it relates to say how does transgender people's representation in mass media change people's understandings, attitudes and opinions around transgender people and transgender rights, where some studies suggest that if there's positive representation of transgender people, that it at least may not necessarily change people's attitudes in a positive direction but it doesn't necessarily change people's attitudes in negative directions. So there's kind of like a null relationship per se, whereas some studies suggest that if there is some negative representation of transgender people that it can actually influence the opinions of the public to be more opposed or more negative towards transgender people. Subsequent research has expanded upon this in meaningful ways. My friend and colleague, tj Billard, did an investigation on kind of what role does the show transparent play in measures of transphobia and what he did is that he actually had people either binge watch transparent versus watching transparent over more kind of weekly times and he showed that either watching the whole show at once or watching the show in intervals either way does reduce, say, levels of transphobia, but that having the longer term does have a more meaningful impact, right, because you're able to build a stronger connection with these characters over a longer period of time. And so there's some good, there's some emerging evidence that's kind of telling us that these narratives do matter.

Andrew: 22:54

And I have some work in this area where I've been doing some media and entertainment investigations around two questions. One is the type of media that people observe and whether or not people would expect to have seen trans representation in this media. So, basically, is this a show that is known to be around, say, transgender people and transgender topics, or is this a show that might just happen to have a transgender character or might just happen to have transgender rights be the focus of the issue? And in my first round of experiments, one of my stimuli was a brief segment of John Oliver last week tonight with John Oliver where he covers transgender rights, this experimental design. Some of my respondents are just in a traditional experiment where they get no choice about what they get to see, and so I forced some people to watch this John Oliver clip. And another part of this experiment is trying to understand how people's own choices kind of influences their attitudes. And so some of my people, some of my respondents, got to choose to watch the John Oliver, but they didn't know that it was John Oliver covering transgender rights, and that design allows me to kind of see what happens when I force people to watch this. And then how is this conditioned by what people want to watch, and that last week tonight with John Oliver clip was quite persuasive. It changed people's opinions around just measures of transphobia, but it did markedly also increase support for a host of transgender rights issues, and so this coverage, particularly on this like people may not have expected it right does kind of move the needle per se. Another part of my stimuli in that study was I also showed a segment from the show Pose, which is quite popular, right, and also is heralded as one of the first shows to have so much trans representation in that entertainment. What I learned from that, though, is that, you know, pose one did not necessarily move the needle per se on any of my outcomes, but that's also because it was people who wanted to watch. Pose were already kind of more pro trans to begin with, and so that was interesting to me.

Andrew: 25:18

In the second arm of so, I did a second study of follow up, where I changed some of the stimuli, and one of the changes I did was that I, instead of using John Oliver, as like this show, where you might get trans representation but you might not expect it, I switched it out and I used the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Netflix show, where there is a trans narrative around the character Theo, and so I got a segment edited segments to tell kind of Theo's coming out story and, interestingly enough, the individuals regardless if they were forced to or if they chose to watch the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the individuals who watched that segment had markedly lower levels of transphobia and significantly higher levels of support for transgender rights. And that's only a six minute clip. So imagine what we're seeing more broadly around. You know people who get some exposure to the lives, to transgender experiences and transgender lives, and there's something about media entertainment that is a part of a broader narrative, as opposed to, this is specifically going to be around transgender people or transgender rights, right, hmm?

Shawn: 26:35

That's super interesting. I actually want to circle back to that later because I think this has implications for strategizing. You know that that type of research I think could be beneficial or have some value to strategizing. So let's circle back to that. Because the other thing that you touched on earlier that I want to just dig into a bit before I forget, is you mentioned a little bit that public opinion research or, in past, related to the queer community and specifically the trans community. There's a dearth of it, like there hasn't been a lot of real research in this area, but that we have seen in the past few years a shift in that we've got a bit more nuance in this research and this includes some of the research that you're doing.

Shawn: 27:18

And then you alluded to that queer issues, particularly trans issues, have historically had what we would call like low salience but a low importance within the electorate. But that's changing. Maybe that's changing in part because of, you know, depictions in media, or maybe it's changing in part, or, you know, in tandem because of, you know, the Republican Party's focus on the queer community, particularly the trans community. But I guess I'm wondering, given the fact that we now have some more research and this is you know research that you're doing and we're seeing impacts of you know, both the media and the political elites. What does this mean for public opinion, or how we study it or how it's impacted? Thanks, dean.

Andrew: 28:00

Yeah, thanks for the question and yes, there was a dearth of research around public opinion and transgender people and transgender rights. I remember sitting through all of the LGBTQ panels at the Midwest Political Science Association conference, I believe in 2014. And I went to panel after panel after panel and it was marriage, marriage, marriage, maybe some other topics and I just noticed that there wasn't a single paper that was being presented or worked on that addressed public opinion and transgender rights. And I just sat there and I said, well, I actually have data. So I went home from that conference and wrote a paper from that data and I sent it off to politics, groups and identities, an emerging journal at the time. That is now kind of a flagship for people who study various communities and groups and it's one of my most cited papers to this day, because it's one of the first times that representative data of the American public were analyzed to assess what are the attitudes of the public around transgender rights. And so since then, there's been a wellspring of research around public opinion. That's not just contained in political science, but I do have to say political scientists really did leave the charge myself with Jamie Taylor and Don Harder-Markel, patrick Miller-Dan Lewis and Barry Hadlock. We call ourselves Team Kansas, in part because two of our colleagues are at the University of Kansas, at least for now. But then there were other teams. So my good friends Melissa Michelson and Brian Harrison did some pathbreaking experimental work and even wrote a book on transgender rights and trans-presidents. And of course, paul Brewer and Phil Jones we call them Team Delaware also started doing some work in this area.

Andrew: 29:56

Let me circle back to this question around this explosion of research. And yet at the same time you brought up this notion that LGBTQ and trans issues tend to be say low salience. And I will say that, to some degree, having LGBTQ rights be say of low salience to the American public can sometimes be a benefit. So if you talk to political strategists and those that are trying to move policy at the state level or even at the federal level, sometimes keeping things under the radar is beneficial to them. So if you look at many of these current anti-transgender bills that some are passing, but a lot of the time, if you talk to policy advocates on the ground, they would say don't talk about this policy right now because it's going to die in committee and if you bring more attention to it it might actually start having links and it might actually start moving out of committee and on to the floor. And there is this classic paper now by Don Harder-Markel and Ken Meyer. That kind of says you know, as long as LGBTQ rights remain low salience, the policy development kind of operates like many other interest group policy issues where, yeah, it's a very gradual incremental but there are gains.

Andrew: 31:15

And if you talk to my friend Jamie Taylor, she'd actually say it's like you know, there are costs and benefits to the trans rights movement being linked to the broader LGBTQ rights movement. And you know, one of the benefits is that you're plugged into a coalition that is resourced in network. But sometimes the cost is at some points is that trans advocacy gets marginalized. But then also that trans rights now is tied up with morality, where the morality argument around transgender makes sense, I guess to some people. But I think the morality argument around sexuality had been made so for such a long time that it just kind of got applied to transgender people in some way. Where, in a counterfactual world, had transgender advocacy kind of was separate from LGBT advocacy? It's not to say as clear whether or not it would. The morality argument would be so similarly linked right.

Andrew: 32:14

So so what happens with the increased salience of transgender rights? There's two things right. One is that the increased salience means is that you're bringing in public opinion and the public into these policy discussions more explicitly, and with a society that is not fully on board with trans rights, particularly some areas of trans rights, that does mean that you know the policies that get put in place, particularly like these trans youth and sports bands, are not necessarily counter to what some of the attitudes of the residents of those states want, but it's also because you know they're. These are new issues, particularly new issues for the public at least now. There have been trans athletes in the past, right, and it's important to note that. You know this isn't like the first time.

Andrew: 33:02

This has been a kind of in a public discussion, and so what happens is that you have a public that kind of knee jerk reacts to these new topics, and some of these new topics people feel as though they have a better understanding of, because everyone has an assigned sex at birth, everyone is at least introduced to and indoctrinated into a gender binary right. And you know sports is a part of our culture and so people have this general understanding about what sports is and kind of this binary sex system. And so when you talk about trans athletes, and particularly if you communicate it the way that some of some conservatives can communicate around this, as you will definitely find people that kind of say well, there are to them fundamental differences between people who are assigned male at birth and people who are assigned female at birth, and that does need to physical differences, that kind of translate into, you know, athletics and sports, you know. So the public has increased salience, but they also have this preformed knowledge based upon their own experiences, and so that does kind of allow these policies to kind of have legs, but then also, you know, not necessarily rub against what the public may initially want. So that's where we kind of are now.

Andrew: 34:26

What these policy discussions can sometimes do is that it also offers an opportunity for people to really actually think about transgender people in a way that they probably wouldn't have had the increased salience around these topics would have provided. What that also means is that increased salience opens up the opportunity for people to actually reconsider their preformed opinions. So even in a current environment now, where we're seeing these policies get proposed, some of them get passed, the more that the public has to kind of consider transgender people in an environment where, like I said, people are busy, they're not necessarily thinking about LGBTQ, queer people all the time, right. But if they're actually having conversations, if they're actually talking about, you know, these topics, they could to some degree be reinforcing their preformed opinions around these topics, but they could also be opening up some opportunities for opinion change, and so there is, to some degree, a benefit for increased salience. People are considering these issues.

Andrew: 35:32

Before I look to our current political environment and say the increased salience around trans rights has an immediate effect, of course, in terms of potentially putting into policies that could be detrimental to, you know, many trans people, particularly trans youth, but at the same time, in the broader arc of opinion change, could possibly, you know, lead people to possibly changing their minds.

Andrew: 35:58

I'll add one caveat to that, in that in the 2000s, the conservative movement and those closer with the Republican Party decided that it was tactical and strategic to have these policy debates happen in the court of public opinion and therefore brought in voters via initiatives. That is, the change that you're seeing from in the current politics is that the current politics are happening all at the legislative level and among the political elites. So yes, it's getting talked about in the news media, yes, people are still talking about it, but people are not being as much put to a vote on trans rights as they were around marriage equality. And I think that change in tactic and strategy is intentional that if you force voters to vote on these issues, that they actually have to consider them more than if it happens at the state house.

Shawn: 36:58

So you've mentioned strategy a few times and this is something I did want to talk to you about. Research can be used to understand you know something but it can also be used to strategize and you know, as you've said, like around policy, legislation or even process as to how we implement policy or legislation. So, given what you're learning from this research, how can queer advocates effectively counter the negative narrative that's coming out of the political environment today, or some of these, you know, this legislation is movements we're seeing in red states that are primarily driven by political elites? And then I guess, in answering, like what messaging works and then what messaging maybe should be avoided or doesn't work, All good questions, I think from the research, but then also from what policy advocates have learned over time.

Andrew: 37:46

right is that communicating policy requires two important features. The first feature, of course, is the one that I like, because you know I'm a nerdy political scientist is that you know you do need to have facts and figures, you need to have data in order to kind of inform policy discussion. And that's important because, you know, many times conservative lawmakers make broad and bold claims about the effects of particular policies or allowing certain practices to happen, and without evidence and data they can make those broad claims and not face rebuttal. One thing I'll point to was around the now a few years old debate around whether or not transgender people should be able to use restrooms according with their current gender identity, and there were these broad claims that allowing this opens up the floodgates of people who are maybe not transgender but pretending to be to enter into sex-segregated spaces and predate among women and young girls. And so you know, me and my colleagues at the Winsuit decided to say well, that's your hypothesis around these policy effects, let's actually investigate that. And so we did public records requests across many municipalities in Massachusetts, with locations that had some protections and locations that it thought, and one of the first things we learned is one the occurrence of such types of crime were at least reported to the police incredibly low. And then the second thing was that we found no real clear association between having these policy protections in place and these types of violence. So now we have data that we can at least point to to some degree to kind of rebut certain claims, and that's been the case across the history of LGBTQ rights. So one of course is that you need the data, you need the evidence. Policy makers can sometimes choose to look at that evidence and emphasize it, and sometimes they can choose to not do, but having it a part of the legislative record is important as well, because many of the times these policies that may be on their face even if on their face were not discriminatory that could have these very impacts and other effects, and so they can get challenged in the court of law. And in the court of law, facts and figures do carry weight.

Andrew: 40:16

The other part and in policymaking I think the more important part are the stories that are told, the human lives that are affected around policy. There's a framework in policy, in the policy world, called the narrative policy framework, where basically, storytelling is what really grounds how people, policymakers, but then also members of the mass public really see the connections between an abstract policy and its real world impacts. What makes a compelling story and a compelling story, of course, has the individuals who might be affected by the passage of a policy, so the victims. A compelling story has values that get communicated, values that might be shared between the people who may be affected by a policy and those in the broader public, and these connected threads, and so when I think about strategic communications within the alternative movement, they're always thinking about what are the shared values between LGBT people, trans people and the broader public?

Andrew: 41:20

What are the values that are implicated by certain policies, say, excluding trans people from participating in certain types of athletics? What are the values that go into being more inclusive? Shouldn't everyone have a chance to play sports when they're young? And that's what Brian Harrison and Melissa Michelson did in the book is that they actually said that one way to encourage people to be more supportive of trans rights is actually to remind them that they are good people and that they want to be good people, and that's, in and of itself, a value and so being a good person might just be that you just don't want to exclude categorically a whole population on any matter.

Shawn: 42:08

This is actually a good segue, because there's another area that you study and it's particularly important, so I don't want to let you go without discussing it and this is mental health and safety of queer folks, particularly queer kids. You know the toll that this broadside kind of onslaught of targeted anti queer legislation is exacting. So I guess my question to you is what's this doing to the community, and especially queer and trans kids? And then how can we those of us that are inclined, you know support in meaningful ways?

Andrew: 42:36

All great questions and, yes, this is where I wear many hats in social science, right, so my home is political science, but some of my research has kind of looked into how has political environments affected LGBT people? Can it affect it adversely as well? As you know, in not in adverse ways, and particularly when we looked at the 2012 marriage equality campaigns, that happened. So you're putting your rights up for a vote, and four states had something going on with energy quality and we had really good robust data from the Gallup organization that finally measured LGBT people, and so we were able to kind of look at how did the wide broadcast of anti marriage equality campaign ads affect LGBT people and how did you know why broadcasts of pro LGBT marriage quality ads kind of affect people and what we did find was that disconfirming. So anti marriage quality ads really increased self reported stress among LGBT people and you know psychological reactions are emotional responses of like sadness or feeling less happy and other emotional responses like that were increased, whereas affirming messages also had the opposite effect, actually, that we saw that respondents that had higher rates of receiving those affirming messages also reported greater levels of happiness and lower levels of sadness. So this is unique because of this theory known as minority stress, that by being a member of a particular minority group, that there are distinct and unique stressors that you face in your day to day life, but then also in unique times and unique politics that should likely affect you in a different way than if you were not a member of that minority community or minority group. And so when we saw these unique effects on LGBT people, it really related to this idea that there are stressors that can be quite poignant and quite unique to particular groups.

Andrew: 44:46

And so, if you think about the current policy discussions around trans rights, this is a stressor on the queer community, but then, particularly among the trans members of the community, it's important to kind of think about the potential spillover effects. Right, there are people who might be, who are definitely going to be directly affected, say, by the policies that were just passed in Tennessee and Florida and other states, right, but then you know how does that the mass communication of these policy developments also potentially spill over to trans people in other states who now may feel stressed or concerned about their own rights in their state because of what they're seeing, say, in what's going on in the current policy discussions. And so what does this do Just? Ultimately? It affects the emotional well-being or mental health. It can affect physical health, the literature, minority stress and what is known as structural stigma. So how policies actually kind of stigmatize members of the LGBTQ community is that we see the correlation, and some research designs can see the causal relationship of what these things do to the disparities that you see around mental well-being, suicide ideation, alcohol and drug abuse.

Andrew: 46:02

There are going to be immediate effects of these policies that get passed that will be, say, detrimental on these physical and mental health outcomes for LGBTQ people and particularly trans people.

Andrew: 46:17

And that's just one way in which you know structural stigma works.

Andrew: 46:21

Another way is that not only is our current political environment considering and sometimes passing these policies, but our current political environment has also had an uptick in rhetoric that is highly stigmatizing of queer people across the board. And so that increased anti-queer sentiment being communicated, even if it's communicated by, say, a minority of the broader population, of course increases the stressors and stigmas that LGBTQ people may face in their day-to-day lives and it may encourage some individuals to act upon, say, this increased stigma that they maybe might not have in a different climate. And so here I'm considering, say the recent protests, armed protests against libraries, against these drag queen story hours, and so you know, so you can think about how this overarching context, how does that feed back in more of the mechanisms that get to the stressors, to individual LGBTQ people, and sometimes those are through just the communications. Other times it's because there are individuals who otherwise would not be holding a gun and protesting a drag queen story hour, now doing it because the climate has motivated them to do so.

Shawn: 47:49

You know I've been thinking a lot. So I'm a cis, white, gay man and I have been experiencing a lot of anxiety in this kind of this environment that's really percolated and taken hold. Especially in the last couple of years I've experienced a lot of anxiety that's manifesting, as in my adulthood, as probably more defiance and anger. But I've been thinking a lot lately about when I was a child, in my formative years, how I felt in a more oppressive, less accepting society. It did manifest as shame and a fear of, you know, being myself, and so I've been thinking a lot about queer kids now and what this must be doing to them or the impact that this must have on their development, especially in an environment where three, four, five years ago it felt a lot better than it does now and it really makes me worry about this generation of kids. Is that founded or do you have more faith than I do?

Andrew: 48:46

I feel you in the sense that, yeah, in my youth as well there's definitely. You felt that, you felt the stigma, you felt the shame. I personally grew up in Southern California. Everyone goes, oh, progressive. I grew up in the deserts of Southern California where there were, you know, highly religious individuals and a lot more conservatives in my environment. So, yeah, of course I see that as well, and so I have two thoughts.

Andrew: 49:17

One, of course, is, yes, there's definitely going to be stress, distress and feelings of powerlessness among youth, queer youth, trans youth, given our current politics. But I always have to add the caveat there that this is also our youth, broadly speaking, are so much more LGBTQ friendly and also themselves more LGBTQ, or at least outward identifying, than generations past. Look at the Florida students walking out and protesting the anti-LGBTQ bills that have been passed by Florida, and it passed in Florida right. Look at the activism that has cut across, say, many states. That has been youth led. So at the same time, yes, stressful, there is concern, say, among advocates and others what are these policies going to do to the livelihoods of young people? But at the same time, I have to, you know, send that message of positivity in the sense that the young people are politically minded and active in a way that I don't know if I necessarily well, I mean, I was, but I was a special kid at that time but you know the way that my peers were kind of not really engaged or thinking about politics, not really organizing or mobilizing in a different way.

Andrew: 50:44

So I do think there is going to be a response and if you look at, as I talked about earlier, around generational replacement, when these younger individuals enter into adulthood and become voting members of the public, we're already seeing our politics kind of get affected by that.

Andrew: 51:04

The midterms in 2022, that the younger voters pretty much based upon certain empirical things that I found pretty much canceled out, if not exceeded the votes of the older individuals in many, in many close elections. So there is like the immediate what's going on, what's going to happen right now, but there's also going to be like what are the ramifications about this in the long term? And as young people become more politically minded and look around at you know what this two party system currently kind of offers them, I do think that they're going to see the current activities of many elements of the, say, republican Party and may not necessarily see that as part of them, not to say that that's going to happen across the board, but the data kind of do indicate that there's this. The Republican Party does not appeal to young people.

Shawn: 51:57

Okay, final question what's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately, and it doesn't have to be related to this topic, but it can be.

Andrew: 52:06

Yeah, yeah, I actually tried to prepare this one and then I wrote down too many things, so I'll keep it to one that it's one that I'm just really excited about. So a historian of mine at Cal State, Fullerton, a friend of mine, Eric Gonzava, and his colleagues have put together a website called Mapping Gay Guides, and what they've done is since the 60s there was an author who wrote books that kind of was the queer version of, kind of if you're traveling, here's where you can go to find, you know, queer friendly spaces, right, and so basically it's kind of an almanac of queer bars, queer friendly restaurants, queer friendly hotels and XYZ. I recently have been trying to kind of think about what is the historical vestige per se of queer presence on current politics and current political attitudes, and I was inspired because of an article that was written a few years back in the American Journal of Political Science that kind of asked the same question about what is the historical lineage of slavery on current set of political attitudes. So is there a way that you can actually say that outside of even contemporary political dynamics is there a historical vest, a historical mark of what slavery has done on southern politics? And I want to do something similar around queer presence and using these Mapping Gay Guides to kind of say, like here are the queer locations that kind of were established before the Stonewall riots and we see some kind of historical connection of such presence on current political matters.

Andrew: 53:52

And the cool thing with the AJPS article is that they used what is known as an instrumental variables design.

Andrew: 53:59

They found something that likely could be, say, exogenous to the amount of slavery that was happening in different portions of the South.

Andrew: 54:09

What they use is topographical data where it was kind of where certain locations actually just naturally ready made for kind of more cotton growth than others, and since that is something that was existent prior to the institution of slavery, they can use that as kind of an exogenous instrument to kind of say what portion of the variation can we actually causally identify? So I'm just currently working on this but I want to use and you can tell me if I'm off base here because I haven't explored this idea fully yet, but I want to use the presence of naval bases in the 1920s as exogenous variation in the presence of queer spaces in the 1960s, Because there is some historical record to suggest that the Navy would discharge queer people for being queer and leave them deported at port cities such as San Francisco, New York, DC and other locations like that, and I might use the presence or at least proximity to those locations as some sort of exogenous variation to help me kind of gain some causal leverage around the historical presence of queer identities. So, yeah, I'm excited about that.

Shawn: 55:26

So I moved out here from Boulder, colorado, and when I lived out there, I became friends with someone named Clila Roarex. You may or may not know that name, but she was the first county clerk in the United States in 1975 to knowingly issue same sex marriage licenses to people. One of her the licenses she issued that couple was a bi-national couple received a green card in like 2014, 2015 from the Obama administration, based on the license that Clila gave in 1975. The reason I'm telling you this is I was working on a project about Clila and this story and people would always ask me what is it about Boulder that, at that time, made it so queer friendly? They also had one of the most progressive anti-discrimination laws that targeted queer folks as being a protected class.

Shawn: 56:21

In Boulder in the early 1970s they had a gay council member open gay council member. So people would always ask me what is it about that area that made it so queer friendly? And I've never had an answer, and so now I'm going to be looking to you to figure that out. But there is an air base nearby Colorado.

Andrew: 56:39

Springs Right, and this is what I'm also thinking about. Maybe it's not just Navy, maybe it's the location of military bases, because it's highly unlikely that the military is selecting queer centers to their bases right, and then the difficulty.

Andrew: 56:55

Difficult thing is that a lot of this data actually doesn't exist on the web as easily. But luckily I'm in DC, so I imagine that this project is going to take me to the National Archives to actually get the geolocation data of many of these bases. That may actually give me some kind of causal leverage of kind of these historical stories that you're talking about, what makes Boulder so unique, at least a part of that story. So I'm kind of excited about it.

Shawn: 57:24

Well, I'm excited for you, d Flores. We've run out of time. I've got so much more I'd like to talk to you about, so maybe I can have you back some time to talk a bit more about this. But thanks for being here. It's been super informative.

Andrew: 57:36

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm actually happy to come back. When I have these kinds of discussions, I realize that I have so many more ideas that I have to kind of keep in separate containers, or else I wouldn't be able to get any work done.

Shawn: 57:51

I understand that.

Justin: 57:58

He Justi, hey S, how are you doing? I'm well. How are you All right?

Shawn: 58:05

I mean I'm all right, but there's a reason I'm calling you. So I've been neck deep in politics as I do and that can be kind of demoralizing and you're one of the most deliberately positive people I know. So I'm hoping you can help drag me out of it. Do you have anything for me?

Justin: 58:26

Yeah, well, I think first, s, let's acknowledge that we are not in a necessarily positive time in our politics, and so I think just acknowledging that is really important. But I would say this, I would say, yeah, we can, I can, I hope I can drag you out. I think you can drag yourself out. This weekend I went to the South Sound Sustainability Expo, and so this is a. This is a place where they bring all these different community organizations, government agencies, vendors, etc. Together and they have folks come in and learn about different sustainability practices. And so it was a dreary Pacific Northwest Saturday.

Justin: 59:07

We're outside and you had families there that you know we're learning how to plant trees and you know getting free. You know little baby pines that they could take home and plant and get folks learning about. You know rain gardens or or rain barrels and how to better, you know, do landscaping so that you know when there was runoff, that the runoff was limited and that we were, you know, better protecting the waters of the sound. And you know all of these people doing this kind of on the individual, you know really local, grassroots level, and while there's a lot of big problems around climate change and there's a lot of big things we have to do.

Justin: 59:49

I think if you look for the small acts, you know, you look for the people that are are doing the, the individual things trying to make a difference. That if you look at that and you think about, wow, if everybody that went there got a tree and planted it, like, does it solve the big problem? No, but does it make an impact? Does it start to solve the problem? Yes, you know, if you think about those people that were there and they learned about rain barrels and now they're going to go back, they're going to do that at their house and then they talk to their neighbor and their neighbor does it and it's that slow, you know, kind of grassroots progression, that, I think, is what. What gives me the hope that the so-called you know big problems that we have, or the intractable problems we have, actually can be solved. So I don't know, does that help?

Shawn: 1:00:41

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, what it does for me is it's a good reminder and it's not necessarily just about, like, climate change, but like it's a good reminder for me, because I think what I end up doing, and probably what most people end up doing or could end up doing, is feeling completely overwhelmed by the big picture and lose sight of the. You know two things One is that we can only do so much as individuals, but two, that there are actually things that we can do that make a difference. They might be on the margins, but they're making a difference.

Justin: 1:01:12

Yeah, I think you're right. Like you know, it's around the margins until it isn't Right. I think if you look at like a tipping point.

Justin: 1:01:21

Yeah, yeah, exactly, if you look at many of the things that you know throughout history, where it's been, well, here's this you know, fringe idea, fringe group of people. You know folks that are, you know, quote, unquote the minority status, right, folks. And and you know well, we don't have to give them rights, we don't have to let them vote, we don't have to let this happen or that happen. And and slowly people start to say, well, yes, yes, this should be the way it is Right, we should let these folks into our community, we should make sure that we're, you know, providing a safe space for folks, whatever it might be. And and I think you get to a tipping point where that, that that margins of change, actually becomes the change.

Justin: 1:02:06

And obviously there's sometimes, you know, there's there's reaction to that. And I think, you know, we have to just keep reminding ourselves and keep pushing forward of, like, yes, there will be reaction, but you know, it's the. The long arc of history bends to justice, right, quote, it's the. You know folks standing, you know, on the street corner saying, you know, like, come in, you're welcome, it's the. It's all of that stuff that I think is the, the positive, that, if we just keep thinking about that and keep doing that. It does become. That becomes the norm. And then the other, and then the other people who are saying you know, climate change doesn't exist or you know trans folks shouldn't be in society they're, they're actually. They're actually the outsiders.

Shawn: 1:02:55

You know, this last point that you make is you know, I think the thing that I've been really wrestling with lately is the impact of so much of this. You know, anti-trans legislation and the rhetoric associated with it that you know, it's really gotten me thinking. We talked about you know, I talked to Andrew Flores out of American university for this episode, actually about how public opinion is influenced on these types of issues, and and we talked about one of the things that's really nagging at me, which is just the impact that this all has on kids. You know, like I can't help but think about what's going on in, you know, florida and Texas, and now in Montana and Tennessee. You know the impact that this has on kids and I put myself in their place. You know, I remember what I was struggling with when I was 12, 13, 14, and it makes me worry for those kids and wonder like what the you know bright spot is for them.

Justin: 1:03:52

Yeah, and John, I think you're. I mean it not only makes me worry, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking that we have decided that our kids are our enemies, right, and that a service or that a certain set of kids is an enemy, and I just don't understand. I, logically and emotionally, can't understand that. And you know, that's where I think it, where I would say, like, we have to solve that at the legislative level and we have to solve that at the individual level. And so that's where I think individuals have the ability to do both. Right, we can. We can call our state legislatures, we can call our, you know, our federal legislature, we can call our elected officials right and make that change, and we can make sure that we have.

Justin: 1:04:37

If there is a trans kid in our neighborhood, or you know that, we know through a friend, you know we can be, we can make sure we are welcoming and we can. You know how we can put out the pride flag or the pride progress flag. You know on a regular basis to say, you know, hey, this is a, this is a welcoming house, and we can do those things. That, yes, I don't. You know, I don't think that that's. That takes away all of the hurt and the pain that this legislation causes, but it does provide maybe a ray of hope for folks. You know, the smallest kind of acts of kindness can have the biggest impact on people and that's what I try to hold on to. And it's really hard. It's really, you know, for everybody that's dealing with all of this and all the things, that it's really hard, and I don't think we should we should discount how difficult it is right now and I just try to say you know what, somehow we're going to make this better.

Shawn: 1:05:33

You know what this is making me think of, a reminding me of, and I think you're making an implicit point here. So do you remember at one point, when Hillary Clinton was running for president I don't know if it was 2016 or 2012, but there was some little girl that started crying at one of her events for some reason, and Hillary said you know, like you don't need, these are not things you need to worry about, these are things adults need to worry about. So you don't worry about it, I'll take care of this and you just enjoy being a kid. Do you remember that I vaguely remember.

Justin: 1:06:09

I remember the, the. I remember the scene. I don't remember all the specifics, but I mean it definitely sounds like something that would. Would come from something like that.

Shawn: 1:06:19

It's reminding me that I'm an adult and you're an adult, and we are adults in this situation that I think have more responsibility to step in and care for these kids and stand up for them in places that they can't or they might not otherwise feel empowered to do so, and that's actually an empowering thing, that's, you know, like, that's a that's a good point to make on your part.

Justin: 1:06:42

Yeah, I think you're right, Shawn, I think we have, you know, we have the responsibility to, to leave, you know, to make things better for our kids and for their kids, and and I don't mean our, you know, I don't mean our physical kids, like the people that you know we have made, I mean, as a society, right, the people that that come after us and the generations after us. And I think that you know that that happens at a large scale, right, it happens by us, you know, actually taking climate change seriously and doing things at a national and international scale. And it comes from, you know, taking, you know, the neighborhood kids to the, you know, sustainability expo and having them learn about trees and helping them plant one, and you know it's all of it. And we, you're right, we, as the adults, we have a responsibility.

Shawn: 1:07:34

Well, thanks, justin, I do feel better.

Justin: 1:07:37

Good, I'm glad I can help. I will send you the bill in the mail. Thanks, talk to you soon, s Yep.

Shawn: 1:07:50

So, from my final thought, I want to talk about our misconceptions about the far right, which is, for all intents and purposes, the contemporary mainstream Republican Party. For years, conservatives have cloaked themselves in anger, probably thinking it to be righteous anger. Anger at an elite liberal class. Anger at a rising class of people they thought were receiving preferential treatment at their expense and to their detriment. Anger at a society with boundaries that seem to be increasingly more critical, maybe even more restrictive of their behaviors and, in their telling of it, restrictive of their thoughts and beliefs. Just anger.

Shawn: 1:08:29

If you tuned into Fox anytime in the 2000s, you would be staring down the open maw of some opinion commentator yelling, screaming in anger about something unfair that was being done to conservatives and at the same time, they ridiculed liberals as snowflakes weak, whiny and thin skinned. This anger culminated in the January 6th insurrection. At first glance, the entire thing was about anger angry people storming the Capitol, demanding through force and electoral outcome they hadn't won. And since then, anger that didn't work. Anger that the insurrectionists are going to prison and okay, maybe I can wrap my head around. Anger over something that you've lost In this case they lost to democracy, but whatever. Anger when they're losing, but they're angry even when they're winning. What was all the screaming about when Trump was president, at least the first two years when they controlled all levers of government? And if you haven't read Justice Alito's dissent from the state of lower court rulings outlying with a pristone for your own mental health, I'm not suggesting you do so. But for a guy that wrote the majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade less than a year ago a huge win for conservatives I'm not sure what he's so angry about. If this modern Republican Party can be characterized by anything, it's just anger when they're losing. When they're winning anger, anger, anger.

Shawn: 1:09:54

But the more I think about this narrative, the more disingenuous it feels. I believe that these people are angry, but I don't think it's anger at the root. It's anger born of something else, and I think this is actually fear. Masquerading is anger. Fear of things they don't know or understand, maybe can't understand. Fear of being unheard or ignored, fear of being shamed, fear of losing status and privilege, fear of diminished power, fear of being wrong, and this fear runs up and down the conservative ladder. It's not just your average Republican voter that's driven by his fear, and it is mostly his. It's also your right-wing opinion commentators your Tucker Carlson's afraid of being ignored, afraid of being mocked and disrespected. It's also your Kevin McCarthy's afraid of losing power. And it's your Donald Trump's afraid of being ignored, maybe even prosecuted, definitely afraid of your relevance.

Shawn: 1:10:52

And then I think of my community, the queer community. You're bullied and you're beaten, you're made illegal, you're sometimes murdered by these people. You're mocked as being weak and less than undeserving of basic dignity and human rights, as determined by this hegemonic and patriarchal system that privileges white, straight people, mostly men, over everyone else, and their fear of losing that power and control translates to rage and violence and mockery. But to my mind, those of you willing to take the hits, willing to confront ridicule and even murder, you are the strength in the equation, you are the power, you are powerful and they are the snowflakes. So they wield raw power to get what they want because they lack strength, the ability to persuade and lead. And you know, despite what it may look like, despite the images they project about how the world works and what it takes to succeed, most interactions in your life will require strength, not raw power. So it is important to learn how to be strong, not intimidating or abusive. Don't give up. There are people coming up behind you that need to see your struggle and your defiance in the face of this shit. It teaches and empowers them to move us all forward.

Shawn: 1:12:12

We, our community, the queer community come from strength and endurance. This is our history and we are called up. It is our duty to pass that on. On the other hand and this is important to recognize those who violate us and belittle us and strip us of our place in humanity. They inherit and bequeath fear and weakness. They pass on diminished capacity to function in a complicated society and sometimes fear wins or seems to win. But take some solace. Find some comfort in the fact that you cannot see the long view. You don't see where this all leads. So stay in it and stay committed. Even in the darkest of hours. It matters and you're not alone. Stay strong. Alright, I'll be on vacation for the next few weeks, so Deep Dive won't be returning until lateish May. Chat soon, folks.