The Key to Winning Trans Rights Today, I want to talk about an ugly truth: there is a trans moral panic out there. People are scared that trans people and trans issues are going to upset the order of society. It's like how there was a major moral panic around gay marriage back when I was in college, which saw the majority of US states, as well as other Western countries like Australia, moving swiftly to ban gay marriage. Luckily, the gay marriage movement was able to overcome this moral panic relatively quickly, which ultimately led to the vast majority of Western countries legalizing gay marriage over the next 15 years.
So how do we deal with the trans moral panic? I think it's important to look at what causes moral panics. I believe that, at a basic level, all moral panics are caused by a fear about damage to social institutions, commonly held values, and ultimately what keeps the social consensus going. In sociology, the theories that examine social consensus are called 'consensus theory'. They used to be dominant, before the rise of conflict theory in the 1970s. I believe the neglect of consensus theory in Western sociology in recent decades has contributed to an inability to examine and overcome moral panics.
There are many forms of consensus theory, but the most famous and influential school of consensus theory has to be Talcott Parsons's functionalism. Indeed, back in the post-war 165
