I could not agree more Reine. For the foreseeable future and mostly in the United States, but also elsewhere, progress will be slow at best and may very well go backwards some. We are a small minority, actually much smaller than gay and lesbian. If racial equality is so difficult to achieve in this world where there is so much hate and everybody's personal opinion is viewed as the truth it is pretty hard for gender equality of the tiny group of the gender variant to gain much traction. Acceptance is sketchy right now and sometimes a bit of stretch except by only some people who accept variability without tight limits imposed. Tolerance has increased by leaps and bounds but real acceptance where nobody really cares and you are treated like everyone else is next to non-existent. Noticing you are "dressed in the wrong clothes" is very much a part of acceptance; but what isn't acceptance is making an issue of it. And in the last several years making issues of anything that does not fit the public norms is fair game.
However, I am optimistic about the distant future simply because the truth always wins in the end. And the truth is that variability is the norm. We, like nearly all living things, are diverse on many scales and gender variance is one of those scales. It exists because it is a part of the processes that creates diversity. In my opinion, gender variant people have made great progress since before about 1960, but the road ahead is a long and potentially hazardous one so long humans in general hate to embrace the vast degrees of diversity present in our species.
