Why Americans’ Support for Trans Rights has Declined
The Washington Post didn’t really give an answer, but we will.
by Evan Urquhart
The Washington Post today is covering polling data which shows that support for trans people has declined in the US from 2016, in a piece by Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak. The polling itself seems legit, and it’s important to grapple with the implications of this shift, so let’s start there.
This is scary for trans folks! Bathroom laws are a bad idea, objectively, and any trans person can tell you why: Cis people can’t always tell our birth-assigned sex, so in practice bathroom laws force many trans people to choose between following the letter of the law (risking arrest or violence for being in the “wrong” bathroom) or ignoring the law and hoping no one knows or realizes we’re trans. (There are other arguments against these terrible laws, but that’s one simple, nuts and bolts, practical objection that public opinion polling doesn’t force the public to grapple with, and laws and lawmakers should be forced to take into account.)
Setting that aside, however, the Post piece promises to explain “why Americans’ support for trans rights has declined.” The piece does not meaningfully deliver on that promise. Here’s the only explanation offered for this shift:
This offers further context for the views of people who oppose or support trans rights. Those opposed tend to believe “you can’t change your gender” and those in support tend to believe you can. But, think about it: This doesn’t really answer the “why” question at all. We’re dealing with a shift in views from more trans support to less. At most, we can hypothesize based on this finding that some people who once believed you could change genders have, more recently, started to believe you actually can’t. This leads us back to asking: Why the change?
Perhaps it changed because of a well funded and concerted effort to persuade people that gender is a simple topic, that the word "woman” has a single definition, based on a middle school science class definition of biological sex, and the ubiquity of messages insisting that trans rights was not a matter of real people asking for acceptance but of the abstract definitions of words. Certainly such a campaign coincided precisely with the observed attitude shift!
That said, it’s impossible for anyone to prove exactly why people’s attitudes change when they do. Likely the conservative strategy to focus on the definition of the word woman was developed in part based on what messages conservative-minded people reacted most strongly to, with other potential messages finding less purchase, and therefore being less insistently pushed by activism on the right. However, it seems unlikely that people shifting their beliefs about whether genders are either fixed at birth or capable of shifting has nothing to do with an extended national campaign to push them on exactly that point. The Washington Post may have ducked the question, but now you’ve heard the answer here: Conservative propaganda succeeded in shifting attitudes about trans people during the period between 2016 and 2022.