“You have to get used to the pendulum of your acceptance and the threats of patriarchy or government crackdowns on homosexuality, queerness or transgender rights,” he said. “That’s always been with us, always.” 

“When hot men are on screen, people are gonna respond,” transgender writer and consultant Maybe Burke told me. “It’s why Grindr crashes at [Republican National Committee] events, you know? It’s why we see people looking for trans women on dating apps, and also voting against our rights constantly. There’s this dichotomy of us being desirable or entertaining, or whatever word I want to be filling that blank with … but not being considered fully human.”

While conservatives cruise on Grindr, as confirmed by its CEO George Arison in an UnHerd interview last July, queer healthcare is suffering. Arison pointed to policies under President Donald Trump’s administration resulting in “awful” cuts to PEPFAR, a longtime global program to address AIDS in more than 50 countries, and “really bad” changes in the country’s HIV response that is now limiting treatments and care. The current moment also comes as the Supreme Court has veered sharply right, along with the rest of the federal judiciary.

“What’s alarming now is…there are literally dozens of cases that are percolating within the courts,” Law Dork journalist Chris Geidner said. “We have cases that are at the appellate level relating to the ban on transgender people in the military, we have the passport case [on identification], we have cases on efforts to ban federal grants mainly for organizations that do trans work.”

Some observers are raising even bigger alarms. Two former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, including one currently heading Genocide Watch, told Important Context in January there are attempts “to destroy a gender group”, or “genocide against trans people” in the US “in the near future.” The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention’s executive director Dr Elisa von Joeden-Forgey told Important Context that the US is in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.” The non-governmental organization has issued three “red flag” alerts over the Trump administration’s anti-trans actions.

For Burke, these trends show the limitations of the kind of representation discourse that has surrounded Heated Rivalry. “Tiq Milan has a quote in the Disclosure documentary that Laverne Cox on Netflix produced where he says, ‘the more we are seen, the more we are violated,’ and that has stuck with me,” Burke said. “If we can be celebrated in the media, then [it’s easy to assume that] there’s no way that there’s a trans genocide going on, but that’s not true.”

“What happens is people get very caught up in the Heated Rivalry of it all, and they’re not really paying attention to the loss of our rights and the loss of our medical access,” Herrera said.

He also noted that the Canadian drama was palatable to a broad audience, given that it featured masculine-presenting athletes in a monogamous-oriented story that revolves around the closet and doesn’t mention disease.

Still, even if the success of Heated Rivalry doesn’t mean we’re in a queer utopia, it does signal that millions of ordinary people are uninterested in the current wave of anti-queer hatred.

“You’ve got an effort to push one culture from the people who are in charge of a lot of key institutions, but that’s not actually the cultural moment that people want,” Geidner said. “These are nothing more than attempts to create differences and create exclusionary policies so that further exclusionary policies can be justified, and it has never worked, and it will not work.” 

Black transgender attorney Kylar Broadus, founder of the Trans People of Color Coalition, agrees. “While we see this big pushback in trying to put us all back into a package or can of 19… whatever, that’s not going to happen because society has already surpassed that,” he said. “We’re past that.” 

There is some evidence to back that up: A record high 41% of Americans know someone who is transgender, according to a SRSS study, and 85% said trans people should have the same rights and protections as everyone else. 68% of people in the US support same-sex marriage over 10 years after it became legalized, Gallup found. And a majority of Americans in a Pew Research Center survey said trans people should be protected from discrimination.

“It’s really important to stay as calm as we can in these moments; otherwise we make decisions out of fear, or we make decisions out of complacency because we see ourselves on TV, we think that we aren’t going to be threatened, our access to PrEP won’t be threatened, and our marriage won’t be overturned,” Herrera said about community members. 

“It’s always about being alert, but also very appreciative of all the things that we’ve been able to accomplish, and our ancestors accomplished.”

Broadus, who said he has seen in speaking engagements how “it’s really depressing now” for the current generation, emphasized perspective. 

“While we have a long way to go, we have come a long way,” he shared. “There was no trans visibility in my era, or any elders, and the elders that I saw were few and far, and they didn’t have a good life at all.” 

In the years since, Broadus advocated for the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Act, and he was the first openly transgender American to testify before the US Senate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which he was recognized for by former President Barack Obama.

“I’ve had to live where I couldn’t go outside, literally, so I have to not make it the … focus of my life on a daily basis,” he said.

Art and popular culture can humanize oppressed people, and that’s prevalent with the introduction of Heated Rivalry amid anti-queer policies today. “It’s almost like everybody forgets we’re human, and we contain multitudes,” Herrera added. “And then all of a sudden, it occurs to everybody all at once that queer people like romance, that queer people have healthy sex, that queer people create art, and we go through that once about every ten years.” 

And for Broadus, it comes down to this point: “We’re no different than anyone else; we just want to live our lives.”