Study Finds Deep Conversations Can Reduce Transgender Prejudice

Prejudices are often deep, obstinate beliefs. You've probably noticed this if you've ever tried to change someone's political opinion at a dinner party. But David Fleischer, the director of the Leadership LAB of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, thinks he's found a way to begin changing people's prejudices with just a short conversation.

He and several collaborators struggled for years to get to this point. "We brainstormed every idea and tried every idea, overwhelmingly those ideas failed," he says. And once he thought they had discovered a powerful way to fight prejudice, an enormous scientific fraud perpetrated by other researchers tumbled their progress back a year.

He and his colleagues started the effort in 2009, shortly after the Prop 8 constitutional amendment and struck down same-sex marriage in California. "The LGBT community and our allies were shocked and upset," Fleischer says. "Out of that outrage and despair, people wanted to do something very constructive." He and LGBT Center volunteers began talking to as many people as they could, trying to understand why they lost Prop 8.

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