What Can We Make of Polling on Trans Issues?
Riki Wilchins offers some post-election trans polling analysis.
by Riki Wilchins
Voters may have adverse opinions about trans people, but they don’t seem to run very deep—even among Republicans.
Here’s a recent Gallup poll of the top 25 campaign issues. You’ll notice that “Transgender rights” is dead last among issues voters said were Extremely Important to them, ahead of only Climate Change, which we know most Republicans don’t even believe exists.
So one way to read the reportedly $215m that Republicans spent on closing ads targeting trans issues was that they were appealing to white evangelicals because this is the group that overwhelmingly favors him and forms the core of his hard-core MAGA support voting 81% for Trump.
From the PRRI 2024 poll, just one-quarter (26%) of Dems favored bans on pediatric care. That number is still much higher than it should be, but 74% is still amazing progress when you consider that Norman Spack opened the nation’s first pediatric clinic only in 2011, just 13 years ago. Before that, hardly anyone had even heard of the issue.
Finally, here’s a 2024 You Gov poll, which I’ve had to rework here since they have it formatted very strangely. You Gov is online (unlike some pollers which still use person-to-person phone-calls) so it should be taken with a grain of salt, and annoyingly they don’t break it out by party identification.
Courtesy of You Gov polling, www.today.yougov.com
As you can see, it’s all over the map. It pretty much lines up with other polls. I was surprised at the net positive support +7% for gender neutral bathrooms. Support for trans people in the military, which Trump banned by tweet in his first term, is now solidly above water at +22%.
We’re barely losing on hormones and puberty blockers, within about 10% of breaking even.
When it comes to issues around women and girls which TERFs and others have prioritized – bathroom use, girls’ sports, and prison policies– we’re still underwater. Girls sports looks like a lost issue nationally for the time being.
Surprisingly, bathrooms are now just at net -12%, so people are finally losing their paranoia about trans women who just need to pee morphing into “predators.”
Sadly, Republicans have successfully painted drag queens reading The Little Prince as a moral danger to school kids.
If I had to summarize this it would be three things.
First, there is no single “trans issue” there are many different trans issues and people poll differently on each of them.
Second, even among Republicans, trans issues are not a big concern and barely make their top two dozen priorities…except the hard-core evangelical MAGA voters who unfortunately are driving the Republican bus right now.
Finally, no Dems, trans issues did NOT cost us the last election. But more about that and some very interesting polling next time. Thanks for reading!
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.