Do you find that you tend to underestimate peoples' openness?

I get this all the time. It seems my area is more accepting of transgender people than I'd expected. And people I've encountered (online, for the most part), are rather passé about it. Worst I tend to have to do is explain what an FtM is but I very rarely encounter any open transphobia beyond transchasers and creeps.

 

^
Gotta love the pacific northwest!

I kind of have a similar story. When I was in 10th grade I had an English teacher, Mr. N, who was gay (so they say), but didn't seem to be out or very vocal about it. Toward the end of the school year, there were rumors going around that he was gay due to some facebook detectives of some kind. He only taught at my school for that year, I suspect because he endured some level of hell teaching there, but I digress.

Anyway, the year after he left I was standing with a couple of friends (who had the same teacher as me) between class periods and his name got brought up. One of them went on to say, "Wow, did you guys know Mr. N was gay? How gross, I mean, you think you know a guy..."

Ironically one of the people he was talking to also happened to be gay. Remarkable powers of perception on that one.

 

For being in Idaho, my town is actually really accepting in a weird way. Keep in mind that Idaho is one of the reddest states in the nation, and my town even has a giant billboard right next to the town entrance that tells us that we should secede from the nation, and I believe our anti-sodomy laws are still technically in place even though they aren't enforced. You would think I would be terrified.

Turns out, about half the town is gay friendly, while the other half just doesn't talk about it. Of course there's the vocal minority who will occasionally yell about how much god hates fags, but it never starts anything. There are a ton of people who agree with him of course, but none of them say anything. Open homophobia is actually relatively rare in these parts. I think it's because my town generally has the "if you don't deal with it, it will go away" mentality, so biggots are too lazy to be biggots.

I also had a "gay" choir teacher. I say "gay" because he wasn't really out, so to speak. One of the regular substitute teachers was his partner, but they didn't talk to each other at school. Most of the time, you would run into the two of them at the store or something, and they would try to hide it (sometimes they would split up) but they are always together when they aren't on school grounds.


Northern Idaho on the other hand, nothing in the world could make me even try to go up there.

 

I assume people are close minded until proven different. I tend to assume LGBT people are more open minded though, although, that's not always the case.