It’s going to take work to educate people about this issue:
Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children, a Washington Post-KFF poll finds, offering political jet fuel for Republicans in statehouses and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care.
Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth. A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ.
This is the saddest part:
And some Americans have become more conservative on these questions as Republicans have seized the issue and worked to promote new restrictions. The Pew Research Center found 60 percent last year saying one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, up from 54 percent in 2017. Even among young adults, who are the most accepting of trans identity, about half said in the Post-KFF poll that a person’s gender is determined by their sex at birth.
Alyssa Wells, 29, a behavior therapist in Daytona Beach, Fla., who participated in the Post-KFF survey, said her views have changed on this issue in recent years as she has learned more, chiefly from Christian podcasts.
“At first I was on the side of acceptance, like using the pronouns and stuff, because I want people to be kind to each other. I don’t want people fighting all the time,” she said. But she has come to see things differently. “My concern with transgender is mostly with the children.”
“We can’t vote until we’re a certain age, we can’t smoke, drink or whatever, but we can change our bodies’ anatomy and how it works?” she said. “It just doesn’t seem like that’s okay to me.” Treatments for trans youth sometimes include hormone therapies, but not genital surgery, which guidelines generally say doctors should not provide until patients are 18.
Still, as the country engages in a national debate over public policy around gender identity, interviews and other poll findings suggest that many Americans hold complicated and sometimes contradictory views on the subject.
A tiny silver lining:
While a majority of Americans oppose access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children and teenagers, for instance, clear majorities alsosupport laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people, including in K-12 schools.
I guess that’s something. And it does appear the Ron DeSantis went too far when he banned discussing transgender issues all the way up to the 12th grade:
It’s always something with the right. While it’s understandable that some people haven’t given it much thought and are trying to wrap their minds around all the nuances of this issue, the actively hostile are in the midst of a full-blown panic about “grooming” which is just another version of the 90s “indoctrination” panic about LGBTQ rights. And while it’s obviously good that a large majority disagree with the idea that schools can’t mention trans issues in high school, they really should stop and think about just how this would come up in the lower grades. Nobody’s “teaching” trans in the first grade. But it would come up because it exists in this world and teachers should be able to kindly address it if some little child brings it up. But I guess people think we should instead “teach” it as a taboo subject and perpetuate the idea that there’s something wrong with it.
There is some reason to hope that this is going to change:
These more nuanced views were also expressed in focus groups on trans issues with swing voters conducted by Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president for social policy and politics.
“This is all very new to the American public, so unlike some of the other cultural issues, these opinions are not set in stone,” she said.
As in the Post-KFF poll, Third Way’s research found significant concerns over sports participation and medical treatments, though Erickson said views would shift when focus group participants were presented with specific scenarios. Voters in the Republican base are animated by these topics, she said, but independents have given them far less thought.
“This is not abortion. This is not even marriage equality. People have not talked about the details. The more you talk to people, the more they change,” she said.
She added that independent voters know a lot more about what it means to be transgender than they used to. Five or 10 years ago, she said, people would talk about drag queens or the movie “Tootsie,” a comedy about an actor pretending to be a woman to get cast in a soap opera. Now people understand better that being transgender relates to one’s internal sense of gender identity, Erickson said.
The Post-KFF poll found that 43 percent of cisgender adults personally know someone who is trans, not counting acquaintances. This group was much more likely to say a person’s gender can differ from that assigned at birth, with 53 percent of them saying that it can, compared with 35 percent of those who do not have that personal connection.
Experts say these sort of personal connections were an important part of increased support for gay and lesbian rights, notably marriage. One outstanding question is whether public opinion on trans issues will follow the same trajectory.
The 43 percent of people who know someone who is trans is comparable to the 42 percent who in 1992 said they personally knew someone who is gay or lesbian, per a CBS News/New York Times poll. That 42 percent grew to 77 percent by 2010.
Transgender people represent about 0.6 percent of the U.S. population, according to surveys, though the figure is higher among those 18 to 29 years old — about 2 percent. When people who identify as nonbinary are included, the totals rise to 1.6 percent of all adults and 5.1 percent of young adults. That compares with an estimated 2.4 percent of American adults who are gay or lesbian.
As with issues of sexual orientation, younger people are more accepting of differences in gender identity than older people are, though the generation gap on gender identity is not as pronounced now as it was on sexual orientation then.
“If past is prologue, we can say that we’re looking at an eight- to 10-year timeline” for views to change, said Andrew Flores, a government professor at American University who has studied public opinion on LGBTQ issues.
His analysis of public opinion polls found that the share of Americans with warm feelings toward trans people has climbed over time. And he noted that trans characters are more present in media and entertainment than ever before. Those shifts both preceded a change in attitudes about gay people.
There are other parallels, too. Early conservative campaigns against homosexuality were also focused on schools. In 1977, pop singer Anita Bryant, well known for her orange juice commercials, sought to overturn an anti-discrimination ordinance in Miami on the grounds that it would bar firing teachers for being gay. The issue was also fought out in California, where voters considered (and rejected) a ballot initiative that would have required teachers to be fired if they were gay.
“Transphobia is really rampant today the way homophobia was with Anita Bryant,” said Natalia Petrzela, a historian of contemporary politics and culture at the New School in New York. In an earlier age, she said, there were allegations that gay teachers were “grooming” students for abuse; those allegations have returned, now focused on gender identity. “I think we’ve evolved. But we haven’t evolved that much.”
As I said, it’s always something. I’ll keep hoping that people will adjust and realize that LGBTQ people are not a threat to them or all they hold dear. It’s just another aspect of being human and all these people want is the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we all want. It’s not too much to ask.