I have definitely felt a change in the attitudes of most of the people around me as well, like many others in this thread have described — transphobia is the one I personally have felt the most, but racism, sexism and general prejudice have become dramatically more prevalent, seemingly only within the last 5 years or so. Paradoxically, it also seems to be happening (at least in my experience) a lot more with younger people.
The main reason that people have prejudices, at least in my view, is because it's easy. If you've been doing something your whole life, and then you come to find that it does in fact affect someone or something negatively, it's much easier to blame the person or thing for being affected by something that, to you, has no consequence, than it is to reorganise your whole worldview around something which, at least to you, seems to have very little impact.
I am transgender. I have had my fair share of crap jokes made about the way I act or the way I dress, which have ranged from slightly questionable to outright vitriolic. I, as well as (in my experience) the vast majority of other trans people in the world, can generally deal with the jokes. What we care about is being able to engage with society as easily and comfortably as everyone else (that often does include the right not to have crap jokes thrown at you for things about you which you can't change, but I digress). However, seemingly entirely within the past 5 years or so, the trans community has found itself firmly within the crosshairs of the full force of the far-right political machine, enduring a seemingly never-ending torrent of vitriol, at a scale which has arguably not been seen in this century or the latter half of the last.
This is because, in typical fashion, the kinds of shock-jocks and politicians who are most interested in extracting money and support from fanatical citizens have found transgender people — as a group with a very new place in the public consciousness, with problems and lived experiences often pretty incomprehensible to the average person — to be a fantastic scapegoat.
These aforementioned shock-jocks and politicians tend to hit it big whenever public discontent is at its highest. We have come out of a global pandemic and barrelled directly into a worldwide recession and cost-of-living crisis. People's lives are generally worse now, and to have someone in your ear blaming it on a nebulous group of ostensible villains can be, in a strange and horrible way, quite comforting.
This is also my gripe with the term "woke" — "woke" is used largely as a nonsense-word catch-all term for "people who disagree with me" by the kind of people who make a buck off other people agreeing with every word they say.
Are you in NSW, by any chance?
I have relatives in Australia, most in NSW. Several have left the country because of the rise of corruption, crime and fascism. It seems to be the worse in NSW.
