BREAKING: Push Poll Distort’s American Views on Youth Transition
A conservative newswire has a headline that seems big, bad, and concerning. But is this a legit poll, or just a bunch of nonsense?
by Evan Urquart
Public opinion polling data can be useful, informative, and sometimes wildly misleading. In a story for The Center Square, a conservative wire service (meaning that it supplies reported stories for other conservative sites to pick up and disseminate), some claims about the views Americans have about gender affirming care for minors.
It is important to note, first, that in our system of government, individual’s decisions about their own medical treatment and the treatment parents seek for their children, has not traditionally been a matter for the public to vote on. Of course there are some caveats: Government agencies such as the FDA play a role in making sure that treatments that cause harm are taken off the market, and that ineffective snake oil isn’t marketed as if it could cure cancer. But, pretty much, an individual is allowed to choose a course of treatment, and parents are typically allowed to make those choices for their minor children. So, Americans could support banning transgender casts for broken transgender legs, and it wouldn’t mean a trans person couldn’t still go to the doctor with a broken leg and consent to having a cast put on.
Still, given the growing conservative apetite for meddling in the personal healthcare decisions of individuals, this isn’t as reassuring as it could be. In principle, Americans may largely agree we should have autonomy in these sorts of choices. In practice, conservatives seem to be showing they have an apetite for imposing a theocratic dictatorship. All bets would be off then, and they already may be. So it’s worth asking if this poll is legit, or if it’s bullshit.
Catch that wording? The poll question apparently conflated puberty blockers with surgeries and hormones, and pushed the idea that an 18-year-old (who had already undergone most or all pubrtal changes) would have a need for puberty blockers. This does not seem like a normal poll.
The two groups listed by The Center Square as being responsible for this result are Convention for States Action and the Trafalgar Group. So, we wondered, what are those organizations?
Convention for States Action seems to be, bizarrely, a political nonprofit which is advocating for a new constitutional convention to limit the power of the federal government. That sounds conservative, but is a slightly odd fit for a push poll that seems intended to skew the results towards more governmental involvement in private healthcare decisions. Whatever, though, it’s a conservative group, that much is obvious.
The Trafalgar Group is even more curious. They’re a controversial polling organization that is highly rated because, among other things, they correctly called the 2016 election when very few polling outlets did so. Their methods apparently attempt to correct for a polling bias where people say things they think the pollsters want to hear. So, simply by being done by the Trafalgar Group, it’s reasonable to infer the numbers have been biased towards a higher rate of agreement on banning transgender medical care than the actual respondents may have indicated. That doesn’t mean it’s not correct, and we don’t even know exactly what Trafalgar’s methods are, but it does not instill a lot of confidence in this polling outlet.
Because this is a wire service article, we expect to see these results picked up widely in conservative media. If that happens, we’ll do a deeper dive on this, and bring our readers the full picture.