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I think it’s also important to understand the real nuances there. For trans people it got worse into the 80s, like a lot worse. For cis gay people it got different. In the 60s being openly gay would probably get you fired and arrested and it was considered a mental illness. And the sexual revolution was somewhat open minded, but not particularly, better but by no means good. By the 80s it was a culture war issue. The people who’d discounted you as mentally ill were now crying for your death by aids as a sinner spreading your sin. Where before they could ignore you now they were acknowledging you.

For trans people it was just unequivocally worse. In the 60s you were a medical curiosity and possibly a cure to homosexuality. Your forebears had been so aggressively stamped out that the cultural hate had been somewhat forgotten. But by the 80s everyone had found a reason to hate you. The right considered you no different from gay people except sneakier, and second wave feminism had decided that you were antithetical to feminism and deserved to be shunned. All while if you weren’t pretty and straight you couldn’t even get access to hormones and if you couldn’t completely bury your past your job options mostly involved sex work.

Indeed, and in a broader view, humanity has literally always had trans people as long as it has had a concept of gender. So "in the 80s" is emphasizing the cultural lie that acceptance is a recent phenomenon, when actually bigotry about it is the recent phenomenon. The 80s were certainly not an amazing time for LGBTQ folk, but Playboy at least would have been sex-positive and accepting.

So this isn't a "stopped clock is right twice a day" situation, because sex-positive spaces and media would have been more reliable clocks than the culture at large, when it came to this subject.