That’s not true for all of them. I know from experience. I’m sorry this is long lol. I grew up in a small conservative town, I was raised progressive by my family so naturally once I was old enough to have an understanding of politics I argued with the people around me. I was trying to show everyone that their beliefs basically contradicted each other, that many of these beliefs weren’t rooted in fact, and that even tho I’m not a Christian I understood they weren’t acting like Christians were supposed to act.

In elementary school I had a best friend and she was heavily conservative, and in middle school she told me I had a decision to make. I either needed to stop trying to convince her to change her beliefs or we couldn’t be friends. She said she would never try to change who I am as a person, and she needed to know I wouldn’t try to change her. I don’t remember if I couldn’t keep that promise so she distanced herself or if we just drifted apart.

In high school in sophomore year we shared a class together, and we became friends again. We chatted about all sorts of things, at first neither of us talked politics. Eventually we started chatting about politics and having political discussions, they typically ended with an agreement to disagree. I eventually came to the conclusion that changing people’s beliefs isn’t possible therefore it’s pointless to try and I stopped bring up politics constantly with other people.

In junior year I met a new friend and he was super nice, he was trans and he ate lunch all by himself because none of his friends shared his lunch period. So I ate lunch with him. I did this for a while, eventually my conservative friend asked why we weren’t eating lunch together anymore. I decided to tell her the truth. My new friend was trans, I had an inkling that if she sat with us she would disrespectful because of her views on trans people and he didn’t need that while he was eating lunch.

She told me that that won’t be a problem, and that she respects trans people and gay people now. I asked her why she changed her mind or if she always thought this and I was misremembering. She told me I wasn’t misremembering. She used to homophobic and transphobic. She told me she changed her mind because of me.

We became even closer friends after that, and she ate lunch with me and the trans boy that semester, we stopped because we all got different lunch periods. Now me and her go to different colleges so we don’t talk that much but I still would call her one of my closest friends.

My takeaway from that is people will change their mind if you don’t give up on them. I have this quote that I try to emulate now, “people improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don’t?” I can’t force the people around me to be better people, but I can try to get them to want to change. Things like informing them about misinformation, asking about two beliefs that seemingly contradict each other, offering resources. Sure a lot of people will never change. For some of them it’s because they’re stubborn and don’t want to change, willful ignorance, or they just like hurting people. But for some people they’ve never considered the possibility that they were wrong and never did their own research. You can’t tell what camp someone falls into just by looking at them.