Americans favor Dems’ handling of trans issues. That doesn’t mean Americans support trans people.

The same poll that says that 60% of voters prefer the Dems on trans issues also says that 70% of those voters favor barring trans women from women’s sports.

By Artemis T. Douglas & Jane Migliara Brigham

Yesterday, Jan. 29, a poll from Fox News was released that shows that on the topic of ”transgender issues”, American voters prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party by a margin of 22 percentage points.

Some have taken this as a sign that the anti-trans moral panic might be waning. Erin Reed wrote in her coverage of the poll that “voters say Democrats have a better approach to transgender issues by a wide margin—an outcome that suggests the years-long anti-trans panic may finally be wearing thin, at least among voters.”

If Americans voters based their votes on trans rights, this would be the best trans news story since the Transgender Tipping Point. However, this is not the case.

The poll didn’t ask about trans rights; it asked about “transgender issues”. This is telling, as Americans largely don’t vote based on a minority's needs, except if they themselves are part of that minority.

In other words, the only people who tend to dictate their votes based on trans issues are trans themselves. Trans people have overwhelmingly voted for Democrats for as far back as we have data on the subject. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that this recent polling will result in a change in voting patterns.

Lastly, the poll showed that 31% of people who identified with the Republican Party preferred the Democrat’s position. This would be a good sign were it not for the fact that we have no reason to believe that these people will change their vote based on this issue.

A professor teaching me research methods once told me (Artemis) that you can’t assume that a respondent meant something more logical to you; you have to work with their response to the question they were asked.

We have to go by what the question actually was. In this case, the question was, specifically, “Which political party – the Democrats or the Republicans – do you think would do a better job on transgender issues?” That, and only that, is what you have to measure the data by. 

The 60% polling for Democrats' response was to this question, and it shows that Americans voters associate Democrats with handling trans issues, not trans rights, trans issues, better. 

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In a moment where liberals are pushing the transphobic Gov. Gavin Newsom as a potential 2028 presidential front runner, and Democratic Party support for trans people as a bloc is cracking (as evidenced by their voting patterns in recent anti-trans federal legislation), that is clearly not an endorsement of support for trans people or our rights. 

This is the same party who last month had 13 of its House representatives vote in favor of a de facto ban on trans healthcare for trans kids. 

Democrat Politicians in general are far less vocal on the topic of trans rights than they were 5 years ago, and this has allowed for an exponential rise in anti-trans laws across the country. 

In addition, previously secure social norms such as gay marriage are now far more contentious than they were only a few years ago, and Democrats have done nothing to defend gay marriage.

In fact, the second-to-last question listed in the poll shows that 70% of the same respondents support anti-trans sports bans targeting trans women. When asked to “favor or oppose” on the question of “Banning biological men from competing in women's sports”, 70% said “favor”.

Of course, trans women are not “biological men”, but that language is specifically used to target trans women, and the primary targets of such bans are trans women. 

Looking at the breakdown of that question’s data, more Dems support banning trans women from sports than oppose such bans. 49% of them support such bans, and 48% oppose them.

The same is true for all voting blocs measured. By the numbers, 49% of Dems, 70% of Independents and 90% of Republicans support banning trans women from sports. 

Breaking it down by ideology, 50% of liberals, 71% of moderates, 85% of conservatives, and 87% of very conservative voters support banning trans women from sports. 

This is especially stark when you consider that in a poll from a 2017 study, less than 35% of Americans opposed “Allowing students who have had a sex change to play college sports as a member of their current gender”. In other words, in the decade between then and now, the number of Americans in support of trans sports bans doubled, from 35% to 70%.

That 60% of respondents to the more recent Fox News poll said they prefer the position of Democrats on “transgender issues” does not mean that 60% of Americans support trans people. It merely means that given a binary choice between Democrats and Republicans, most choose the Democrats to ‘handle’ us. 

In this case, ‘handling us’ seems to mean further exclusion, just as long as they are polite and use ‘nice’ rhetoric about it.