> Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays
No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
The USA is not the whole Western world.
And in most of the Western World the main culture accept trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up transgender people for who they are would be shunned.
If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are huge chances some character will be officially transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being against it means being against the culture. Culture changes over time thanks to people against the status quo (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the Machine for a long time already.
Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the current status quo you may feel some dread about two things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups will always try to prove their fight is not won); and: what are parts of the status quo which the new generations of counter culture want to see change (and surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for everyone" of our generation?
I think it's difficult to label "majority" culture when most things are split 50/50.
Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20 or so.
Transphobia has been a majority cultural view throughout every culture based on the Abrahamic religions and their strict patriarchal hierarchies. Even given that the nature of gender roles change over time, and concepts like "homosexuality", "heterosexuality" and "transgender" being modern inventions, transgressing those roles has almost always been taboo.
Memoryholing the four years of the Biden administration.
No, not really. The "groomer" panic took place during the Biden years, with plenty of states passing anti-trans legislation and banning pro-trans books from libraries. The Biden administration did not reverse the widespread cultural hatred, discrimination and violence against trans people in the US in any meaningful sense. And it's honestly weird that you would think it even could have, given where we are now politically.
It’s two different cultures, one of which is more dominant, or was during the Biden years. As always, only the dominant culture matters culturally.
The premise that during the Biden years transgender culture was the dominant culture in America is just plainly ridiculous, as is the implication that only transgender identity mattered, culturally, during those years. Again, these were the years when transphobia began to mainstream and become codified into legislation and "antiwoke" and "anti-DEI" culture. It was never dominant, it only just started to become visible enough to really piss people off (similar to gay culture in the 1980s.)
Not transgender culture but elite coastal liberal culture.
What would you call the political culture that has replaced it?
I wouldn’t say anything has replaced it yet, more that the Trump admin is trying to do so currently by removing a lot of programs, banning words, purging employees, etc. Whether that will be successful remains to be seen but coastal liberal culture is very dominant and I don’t see it being replaced any time soon. And I guess you could call the other culture conservative culture.
Probably correctly termed "counter-revolutionary", given the self-used terminology of its proponents. [0]
Historically ironic, given MAGA's ideological birth in the Tea Party movement.
[0] https://americanmind.org/salvo/trumps-smithsonian-counter-re...
I would argue MAGA is somewhat revolutionary from the neoliberal globalist two party consensus in the last 30-40 years. Coastal liberal culture and its components might see itself as revolutionary, woke and so on, but I see it as just a continuation of liberal culture. After all, wokism, or whatever the term is, very comfortably fits in elite coastal liberal culture and that culture has been dominant for decades.
Joe Biden was saying he had the back of Trans people in his State of the Union Address, trans kids especially. His white House was holding Transgender day of visibility and tweeting about transgender issues His Department of Education Secretary was anything but transphobic