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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.

You know, one of the biggest and most welcome social changes in my life has been the progress of LGBT rights.

You know, when I was in high school in the late 90s,

I had literally one gay friend who came out publicly and she faced an enormous social cost for doing so because the prejudice against gay people at that time was so massive. And yet,

just 15 short years later, gay marriage was legalized across the

country because of a Supreme Court decision. And not only that, there was suddenly a full-throated

acceptance of LGBT people in mainstream U.S. society. Everyone from McElmore to Target was

getting on board. For a moment,

it seemed like that new age of acceptance was total, complete, and permanent. But needless to say,

it wasn't. In recent years, we have seen an alarming backslide on LGBT rights, especially for trans people, the T in LGBT. This backlash against

trans people's very existence had been percolating in right wing circles for years. But last

year, Donald Trump rode that wave of hatred, explicit hatred for trans people, directly back to

the White House. He campaigned on transphobia and he won.

And that's somewhat of a new thing in American society, at least when you compare it to the past

...