Melissa Michaelson and Brian Harrison’s Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights starts from a commonly held notion: that contemporary political discourses surrounding the rights of transgender people in the United States carry within them echoes of political discourses surrounding gays and lesbians in the United States in the late 1980s and 1990s. Throughout their study, Michaelson and Harrison both problematize and build upon this idea, utilizing extant literature about mass attitudes toward gays and lesbians as a means to theorize strategies for building acceptance for transgender people among the wider cisgender public. In drawing from research about mass attitudes toward gays and lesbians to develop their hypotheses, Michaelson and Harrison articulate a new theory that they term Identity Reassurance Theory, a means of “softening the ground” by reassuring ingroups of their own identities, so that they may become more supportive of stigmatized groups (47). Or, as Michaelson and Harrison...

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