Polls on Trans Issues Ignite a Debate That Ignores Their Many Limitations
The surveys, and the political stances pundits build from them, lack essential context on how firmly Americans hold their beliefs and how knowledgeable they are.
by Alys S. Brooks
This summer, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, procedures that are widely accepted by medical professionals, require parental consent and are frequently cited by transgender adults as something they wish they could have had themselves.
While the outcome was expected, it was one of the biggest setbacks for trans people at the court, prompting commentary on the strategies of the movements for transgender rights and for LGBTQ+ people’s rights more broadly. The critiques paid particular attention to public polling as a barometer for how the broader American public accepts trans people.
Many people, myself and Assigned Media included, have highlighted a drop in public support. Some people described this in stark terms. For example, in a podcast with U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, the first trans woman to serve in Congress, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein claimed that support had “collapsed” and that President Trump was “winning the argument.”
These descriptions may have left some listeners with the impression that Americans agree with all of Trump’s policies targeting trans people. Klein and McBride don’t fill in the full picture until 36 minutes into the podcast, highlighting areas where a pro-trans majority exists. But in an era in which people frequently don’t look past headlines, many likely stopped listening before reaching that part.
These discussions frequently lack the essential context of how firmly these beliefs are held, how knowledgeable Americans are about transgender people, and how these opinions are formed.
To fill in these gaps, I gathered all polls asking about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from the major polling organizations Pew, Gallup and YouGov, plus several pre-aggregated polls from the Public Religion Research Institute.
These polls included the ones from Pew and YouGov discussed by Klein and McBride. Many of PRRI’s were conducted by the polling firm SSRS and one was done in conjunction with Religious News Service. These are reputable organizations that have done the most extensive polling I could find.
After gathering the polls, I categorized them by topic, classified the responses based on their position and factuality, and created visualizations to illuminate patterns. Like any polls, they can be off due to a variety of factors, which is ameliorated by looking at multiple polls from multiple organizations.
Here is what I found:
Polling on Trans Issues Is Scarce
While transgender rights are now frequently discussed, we lack the consistent polling over time that would allow us to easily track shifts in attitudes.
Public opinion surveys about transgender people (using the term “transsexual”) were conducted by social scientists as early as 1983, but I am unaware of any regular polling or polling on related legal issues until 2015.
The polls in my dataset do not include the absolute earliest polls conducted by academics, but they do reflect that four major pollsters had not consistently polled Americans on the issue before 2015.
Knowledge and Certainty are Low, Too
Despite the increasing visibility of transgender people and LGBTQ+ people as a whole, Americans still have gaps in their knowledge. Take the initials themselves: When asked what LGBTQ means, one in four Americans don’t know what it stands for. One in five don’t know what the shorter and older form LGBT stands for.
The levels of uncertainty are higher on questions about trans people than on those about gay people overall – often much higher.
The number of people indicating they’re not sure is highly dependent on the pollster, which suggests wording and methodology play a role.
Ignorance plays a role in many issues that pollsters ask about. (The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, for instance, found in 2018 that two-thirds of Americans would fail a citizenship test.) It is no different when it comes to trans people. On the knowledge-based questions, no more than 55 percent answer them correctly.
Since the surveys themselves did not provide an answer key, I categorized answers as correct or incorrect, full details of which are available on my own accompanying blog post. In general, when questions were ambiguous, I included them in the overall analysis and graphics, but did not label responses as correct or incorrect.
For example, it’s unclear what the objectively correct answer is to “How much does Biden care about transgender people?” even if some answers are more supportable than others. More fundamentally, it’s not clear that respondents even interpreted that question as a factual statement or as a chance to evaluate the Biden administration’s handling of trans issues.
Many of these are basic questions about transgender people. And some ask respondents whether they agree or disagree with misinformation that has been historically used to justify restrictions on gay and trans people. For example, YouGov asked respondents whether transgender teachers “groom” children, an outright conspiracy theory. Yet of the respondents, only 53 percent disagreed, leaving 33 percent who agreed, and 14 percent who weren’t sure. Similar falsehoods have justified Nazi laws targeting gay youth, a California ballot initiative that would have forcibly outed gay teachers, and Florida’s 2023 “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Elites Shape Opinion on Trans Issues
Research conducted by political scientists Phillip Edward Jones and Paul R. Brewer and published in 2018 — highlighted by Assigned in July —looks at the role of politicians, pundits, and other elites. It found that shifts in public opinion on trans issues have been driven largely by elites, rather than elites responding to public opinion.
A certain degree of elite influence is expected. “Bully pulpit,” Theodore Roosevelt’s term for presidential influence, has a firmly rooted place in U.S. history vernacular. And when elites have genuine, relevant expertise, such as public health officials during a pandemic, it is an official and visible part of their jobs.
With trans issues, however, the loudest elites rarely have expertise. Instead of deferring to relevant experts or trans people, they disseminate outright misinformation, misrepresenting the treatments transgender youth receive, lying about the identity of mass shooters and exaggerating regret rates. Media outlets, especially right-wing ones, often amplify these claims without fact-checking.
The research by Jones and Brewer looked at messages between 2016 and 2018. Since then, politicians, pundits and other elites are speaking more about transgender people, often negatively or misleadingly. In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign spent over $200 million on anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ campaign ads, including $46 million for the “Kamala is for they/them” ads that NPR reported the campaign blanketed swing states with, airing it more than 30,000 times.
Support Varies by Issue
Finally, there’s a significant difference between issues. A majority of Americans continue to support anti-discrimination laws that cover transgender people, ranging from 57 to 62 percent in the studies in the dataset. Meanwhile, other issues, like allowing transgender women in sports, have continued to have more opposition than support, maxing at 34 percent.
Ultimately, polling doesn’t dictate what to advocate for or how to fight for it. It doesn’t reveal objective truths about us or prove our legitimacy. What it does, however, is illuminate the ground we’re fighting on.
Alys Brooks is a writer, editor and tutor who has written about reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ issues, voting, and other public policy topics. She is a member of the Trans Journalists Association and lives in a housing co-operative in Madison, Wis., with her cat, Jax.