Acceptance of any minority is priceless for said minority. By putting a pricetag on trans acceptance, businesses work to fundamentally devalue them and their experience.
Does anyone, literally any sane person, actually believe that corporate America selling rainbows is tangible support? That’s putting the cart before the horse. Queer folk are largely socially accepted->low risk->support.
To be clear, I hope they continue marketing rainbows but I don’t pretend that it’s anything other than convenient money. Capitalism commodifies and co-opts, it doesn’t support. See: black mirror episode 2
I do not know how to measure culture, but the democracy index strongly correlates with LGBT rights. This is why I stated that democratic capitalism is one of the reasons. More over democratic capitalism does not mean capitalism with democratic elections. There should be democratic culture across the population, respect for minorities, for example, democratic institutions, such as independent courts and so on. Otherwise majority can just vote for the dictator into power with honest democratic elections. That would not be democracy, but the dictatorship of majority.
So the reason that non-binary and transgender indivuals in India under the British empire lost rights and social standing was because the British Empire was less democratic than Mughal India and the remaining princely states?
That and the modern situation of non democratic PRC being about as LGBT friendly as much more democratic South Korea, and both much less than Singapore (less democratic than South Korea) makes that strong correlation very suspect once you look closely.
As for culture, I'd suggest breaking the map up into various culture groups as anthropologist have done, and see if that correlates to LGBT rights more.
Or possibly they both share a same reason, hence the correlation (but which does not imply causation, which is why noticing where correlation does not match implies a lack of causation).
That being said, even the illusion that corporations support queer people increases the overall societal pressure to support it. It’s a sign that we won the culture war, definitively.
AB InBev was a great example of this.. They tried some token transgensder appreciation marketing and faced backlash, then reversed it and faced more backlash. Trying for both but got neither in the end.
Or in other words: "One in the hand is worth two in the Busch".
I posit the reverse: that some corporations choose to display tokenistic commodified support because overall social pressure exists to show support of some kind.
Almost half of the United States either hates LGTBQ+ people or has no problem supporting politicians who will promote anti-LGBTQ+ policies. I am genuinely boggled as to how you've come to the conclusion that you've won any kind of culture war, considering its absolutely still going on.
Corporations use rainbow paint to cover their hideous and ghoulish faces while they siphon every last cent out of the people who aren't shareholders. They are not your friends.
