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Comment by ryan_j_naughton | Hacker News Reader

> it'd be very difficult to see a trans president anytime soon.

People would have said the same thing about the likelihood of having a gay president 15-20 years ago. Instead, we had an openly gay and married presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, do quite well in the last election with his homosexuality not being a major point of the conversation.

The amount of progress on gay rights and the public's perspective on LGBTQ rights has been extremely fast. I think (and hope) that you are wrong and that society will be ready for a trans president much sooner than you anticipate.

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There are order of magnitude 15x as many gay people as transgendered people, so you’d expect by chance alone that it would be quite rare for a transgender person to be elected to a role that is contested every 4 years and changes every 5 years on average.

I think society will be ready long before the statistical chance of an otherwise front-runner happening to also be transgender is likely to be satisfied.

BTW, that was literally the joke Dave made. That progress on LGBTQ rights was so fast that they can still use their white privilage against people who look like Dave if they are both white and LGBTQ+. Meanwhile people who marched with MLK jr had to march again in 2020 after Geroge Floyd's murder and in the 90s after Rodney King and again recently due to voting rights and racist redistricting laws. Dave's mistake was he didnt take into account people who were part of both minority groups and face opression on two counts.

I disagree. In particular, there is not a gay president. How did Pete Buttigieg do well? He dropped out, ranking behind Biden and Sanders. In other words, he was supported by but a fringe group. Just him running means nothing.

It will be a while before a trans president is a realistic prospect. The U.S. have yet to elect a female leader of the country 40 years after that was a thing in the UK, and 20 years after Germany. The U.S. now have an openly gay secretary of transportation, hardly a key position in the administration. Germany had their openly gay vice-chancellor and secretary of state a decade ago.

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