The Surprising Reason for the New Homophobia

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Homophobia of course never went away, but not long ago, it seemed like it might. Implicit and explicit bias against gay people fell steadily from 2007 to 2020 and was on track to soon hit zero (!), according to a 2022 study by the psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. This accorded with the ambient feeling of late-2010s culture, when Lil Nas X was the pink-hatted prince of pop and Budweiser was striping its cans in rainbow colors without fear of a bullet from Kid Rock.

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This wave is one symptom of a broader cultural regression. During the 2020s, measures of intra-group prejudices of all sorts—racism, sexism, ageism—have been rising, according to a New York Times article about the return of homophobia by Charlesworth and her Northwestern colleague Eli J. Finkel. Trans folks, long the subject of sustained conservative criticism, continue losing not only public acceptance but legal rights; Kansas, for example, just revoked driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The Atlantic