I doubt that is the case. But rather what the media has been pushing. When half of the cast of every show created today is minority members it is easy for the public to assume that is representative of the nation.

This is too facile a response, I know people like this who are not Christian, and they are many times immigrants.

While these people don't meet very many transgender people, the media gives them the impression that this is because they live in a bubble, which for immigrants is often true. They estimate based on the assumption that their experience is very far from representative. They have the same impression of the number of homosexuals, and they usually know several, but they also get the impression that average Americans know far more than they do. I've lived in immigrant communities for a long time and this has been an amusing point of confusion for decades.

Overestimating their prevalence is generally considered more polite than underestimating their prevalence, so people sandbag on the overestimation side. It is similar to if you asked people how old you are or how much you weigh; they will always sandbag to the more socially flattering side of their true estimate.

I come from a Muslim country, and I never had any Christian think I was transgender. In fact I suspect Muslim Americans probably have the same misconceptions as Christians about how many transgender people there are.

In my experience, the liberal white non-Christians I know are just as ignorant about minorities, they just have different priors. A friend of mine thought Vietnamese people supported Trump to get back at America for the Vietnam War. This is a highly educated person. It’s like COVID—conservatives vastly underestimate the effectiveness of vaccines, while liberals vastly overestimate their risk of hospitalization and death. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shooting....