Joanna Wuest, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a 2024-2025 PRRI Public Fellow.
Since November 2024, there has been much political discussion about whether liberals have gone too far on so-called woke policies. Such criticisms frequently target the civil rights of transgender people and their access to gender-affirming care, accurate passports and drivers’ licenses, and even the bathroom that matches their gender identity. Though opponents of trans rights often appeal to populist tropes — the Trump campaign’s “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” political advertisements — to justify their policy preferences, PRRI data indicate that support for many LGBTQ civil rights issues actually remains quite high. This Spotlight Analysis examines that support and interrogates why some specific trans rights issues may have slipped slightly in popularity.
A whopping 75% of Americans support policies that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in housing, unemployment, and public accommodation. While that percentage has dipped from 80% in 2022, it still represents an increase from 2015, when PRRI started asking this question. Much of that support comes from Democrats who have moved from 78% support to 89% support since 2015 and independents who have moved from 71% to 75%. Astonishingly, Republican support has actually remained just about the same over those nine years, moving from 61% support to 63%.
One way to understand this is that, at least in the abstract, discrimination against LGBTQ people has come to be seen as otherwise irrational or hateful. That was not always the case, of course. In the 1990s, basic nondiscrimination protections were deemed “special rights” by conservatives, a trope that led Colorado to constitutionally ban its cities from passing civil rights ordinances for gays and lesbians. Subsequently, opponents of marriage equality deemed such reforms a threat to the institution of marriage itself rather than a mere project of assimilation for queer people who had long been locked out of its social and economic benefits. Today, over two-thirds of Americans support marriage equality (67%), a record high.
Paranoia and Gender-Affirming Care Bans
Beyond LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections and marriage equality, Americans have become less receptive toward certain LGBTQ rights, especially those concerning access to trans healthcare. In each year since 2022, when PRRI first began collecting data on attitudes toward gender-affirming care for minors, Americans have become slightly less opposed to legal bans on access to that care. The 6-point drop in Republicans’ opposition to trans medicine bans, from 36% to 30%, is understandable given that the GOP has been almost single-handedly responsible for all 27 such state laws banning care as well as the recent executive orders that have chilled hospitals’ willingness to provide that care. But some Democrats have also changed their minds on these laws, moving from 75% to 70% opposition, while Americans as a whole have moved from 53% to 49%.
Moreover, some younger Americans seem to be turning against gender-affirming care, according to new PRRI data showing that only 31% of American men ages 18-29 believe that access to such medical care for minors should be legal in most or all cases. That level of support looks more like men in the 50+ range rather than the attitudes of their millennial and Gen X counterparts. This declining support is all despite the fact that major domestic and international medical associations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, have denounced bans on what they deem to be potentially lifesaving, evidence-based practices.
What might then explain this increasing suspicion toward gender-affirming care in the face of medical experts who warn that bans are dangerous and scientifically unsound? Much of this opposition might be explained by the network of think tanks, lawmakers, and fringe medical practitioners who have spread disinformation about the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care. Such groups have increasingly come to frame trans medicine as not merely risky or dangerously uncertain, but rather an actual conspiracy pushed on unsuspecting adolescents and their families by profit-seeking pharmaceutical and social media industries. In this narrative, the “gender identity industry” sucks teenagers into digital peer networks where they come to misdiagnose themselves with gender dysphoria and then rush into the open arms of clinics and drug companies who are more than happy to place them on “lifelong” therapeutic regimens.
Though such claims are largely baseless, they draw from understandable suspicion of healthcare and tech giants that exercise significant influence over Americans’ pocketbooks and attention spans. And while the gender identity industry was a very fringe idea not terribly long ago, recent executive orders question whether gender-affirming care is consumer “fraud” or “deception,” while conservative state litigation defending bans are replete with mentions of a pernicious “transgender industrial complex.” So, if more Americans than ever believe that trans medicine is the product of a vast conspiracy that preys on the health of vulnerable youth, then it is quite plausible that they do not see gender-affirming care bans as a matter of nondiscrimination at all.
