A next phase in transgender rights: Listening to one another

Trans rights activists are listening without judgment to opponents
The premise: Why would anyone listen if you insult their worldview?
'Deep canvassing' can be effective but it is expensive too

Updated: Jun 29, 2023 / 10:01 AM CDT

A deep canvassing conversation in Alamance County, North Carolina. Courtesy of Deep Canvass Institute/Shannon Myers.

(NewsNation) — In 2018, Massachusetts voters had a choice: Uphold or overturn a law that sought to ban discrimination against transgender people in places like restaurants or bathrooms.

To win the vote, supporters of the law tried something different. Instead of traditional door-knocking, where they would only advocate for their side, they listened.

They asked voters how they felt about the new law. They shared arguments against the law and asked them how those arguments changed their minds. They asked voters about a time when they might have been mistreated for being different, using their answers to relate to the transgender experience.

Massachusetts voted to keep the law by getting almost 68% of the vote.

The approach is called “deep canvassing” and could be a way a bring understanding and decrease discrimination against the transgender community. It’s costly and labor-intensive, but it brings a non-judgmental approach into an emotional and polarizing issue.

If you call people “transphobic, and (say) those are bigoted people that are saying those things, immediately you put up a barrier for folks,” said Vivian Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement at Equality Federation, which participated in the Massachusetts campaign.

“Why would they want to talk to you? You just insulted their worldview,” she said.

The national debate over the transgender community is taking on two different tracks. On one hand, there are intense policy debates such as the regulation of transgen d er medical care and surgeries for minors and the integration of transgender athletes into sports playing as their chosen gender.

At the same time, there are 19 states where a transgender person can legally be discriminated against when seeking housing, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that advocates for LGBT issues. In 22 states, a transgender person can be legally denied access to a public accommodation like a restaurant or a store, the project stated.

Pew Research shows that around two-thirds of Americans support laws preventing discrimination against transgender Americans in employment, housing and public accommodations.

Research by a pair of political scientists shows that the deep-canvassing approach used in Massachusetts could help attack discrimination.

Yale’s Josh Kalla and University of California at Berkeley’s David Broockman were interested in studying the science of persuasion, and the deep canvassing activists were doing gave them an opportunity to do so.

A deep canvassing training led by Down Home North Carolina Deep Canvass Manager, Bonnie Dobson. Courtesy of Deep Canvass Institute/Shannon Myers

They ran studies that were published in 2016 and 2020 showing that deep canvassing helped make people more supportive of anti-discrimination laws protecting transgender people like the one in Massachusetts. It also made people more supportive of policies that benefit undocumented immigrants, like giving legal status to people illegally brought to the U.S. as children.

The Massachusetts campaign had around 50,000 conversations with voters in the lead up to the vote, all with the intention of having empathic conversations.

“We really focused on that personal connection with the canvasser and humanizing the face of what the law was,” Topping said.

This approach is now used for a range of causes — everything from promoting transgender and immigrant rights to persuading voters about abortion.

There’s also a track-record for similar approaches changing public perception of the LGBTQ community. Research from Pennsylvania State University said people coming out and connecting with their loved ones had a major impact in changing the perspective of gays and lesbians in the United States. In short: people got to know gay people and become more tolerant.

Topping emphasized that the goal of deep canvassing is to be nonjudgmental.

“What we really had to do was being able to listen people without judgement,” she said. “We didn’t want to make it feel like we were tacitly approving what they said if they said something that was anti-trans. But we also didn’t want them to feel like they couldn’t talk to us.”

Kalla said that when we try to persuade people, they often get defensive because it threatens their self-image. Deep canvassing has the opposite effect: it makes people more open to other points of view.

He did caution, however, that this form of canvassing shouldn’t be seen as a silver bullet. He noted that for about every 20 conversations during the canvassing experiments, one person became more supportive of the cause. Topping said the conversations often take about 15 minutes.

Kalla said: “Given that only one in three people tend to answer the door and have a conversation, this means that in order to generate one new supporter, you must attempt to canvass 60 people.”

Editors Note: A previous version referred to the group as the “Equality Foundation.” This version has been corrected to refer to the group by its proper name, the “Equality Federation.”