Transgender People New Targets of Hateful Political Ads
Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 22 August 2012 Time: 11:28 AM ET
http://www.livescience.com/22590-transgender-lgbt-political-ads.htmlDENVER — Even amidst emotional fights over same-sex marriage, anti-gay political advertisements have grown increasingly civil since the 1970s, new research finds. For transgender people, however, the media landscape is looking increasingly brutal.
Political attacks against transgender people increasingly portray them as predatory and dangerous, even as ads by conservative groups depicting gay people as pedophiles or sexual predators have dropped nearly off the map, said Amy Stone, a sociologist at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
"Awareness has really been focused on same sex-marriage," Stone told LiveScience. "We haven't been paying attention to the ways that transgender rights are so easily targeted by the [political] right on a local level."
