Transgender issues are a strength for Trump, AP-NORC poll finds

WASHINGTON — About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll — a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans.

But support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youths.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey conducted this month found there’s more support than opposition on allowing transgender troops in the military, while most respondents don’t want to allow transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and oppose using government programs to pay for gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youths.

Schuyler Fricchione, a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother from northern Virginia, is one of those who opposes the government paying for gender-affirming care, especially for young people.

She said she doesn’t want people to make major changes that they might later regret. But she said that because of her Catholic faith, she doesn’t want to exclude transgender people from public life. “It’s very important to me that everyone understands their dignity and importance as a person,” she said.

“It is something I am kind of working through myself,” she said. “I am still learning.”

Opinion at odds with science

About two-thirds of those surveyed agree with Trump that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by their biological characteristics at birth.

The poll found that Republicans overwhelmingly believe gender identity is defined by sex at birth. Democrats are divided, with about half saying gender identity can differ from biological characteristics at birth. The view that gender identity can’t be separated from sex at birth contradicts what the American Medical Assn. and other mainstream medical groups say: that extensive scientific research suggests sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.

A push against the recognition and rights of transgender people, who make up about 1% of the nation’s population, has been a major part of Trump’s return to the White House — and was a big part of his campaign.

He has signed executive orders declaring that people are defined by unchangeable sex rather than gender identity, banning transgender people from the military, and kicking transgender women and girls out of sports competitions for females. Those actions and others are being challenged in court, and judges have put many of his efforts on hold.

Public divide

Although transgender rights and restrictions are a hot-button issue overall, a big portion of the population is neutral or undecided on several key policies.

About 4 in 10 people supported requiring public school teachers to report to parents if their children are identifying at school as transgender or nonbinary. About 3 in 10 opposed it and a similar number was neutral.

About the same proportion of people — just under 4 in 10 — favored allowing transgender troops in the military as were neutral about it. About one-quarter opposed it.

Tim Phares, 59, a registered Democrat in Kansas who says he most often votes for Republicans, is among those in the middle on that issue.

One on hand, he said, “either you can do the job or you can’t do the job.” But on the other, he added, “I’m not a military person, so I’m not qualified to judge how it affects military readiness.”

This month, a divided U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump’s administration to enforce a ban on transgender people in the military while legal challenges proceed, a reversal of what lower courts have said.

Gender-affirming care for youths

About half oppose allowing government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender-affirming healthcare, such as hormone therapy and surgery, for transgender people 19 or older. About two-thirds oppose it for those under 19.

And on each of those questions, a roughly equal portion of the population supports the coverage or is neutral about it.

One of Trump’s executive orders keeps federal insurance plans from paying for gender-affirming care for those under 19. A court has ruled that funding can’t be dropped from institutions that provide the care, at least for now.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration this month released a report calling for therapy alone and not broader gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youths. Twenty-seven states have bans on the care for minors, and the Supreme Court is expected to rule in coming months on whether the bans can hold.

The view from the left

While Democrats are divided on many policies related to transgender issues, they’re more supportive than the population overall. There is no anguish over the issue or other transgender policy questions for Isabel Skinner, a 32-year-old politics professor in Illinois.

She has liberal views on transgender people, shaped partly by her being bisexual and pansexual, she said, and also by knowing transgender people.

She was in the minority who supported allowing transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that match their gender identity — something that at least 14 states have passed laws to ban in the last five years.

“I don’t understand where the fear comes from,” Skinner said, “because there really doesn’t seem to be any basis of reality for the fear of transgender people.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,175 adults was conducted May 1-5, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Mulvihill and Sanders write for the Associated Press and reported from New Jersey and Washington, D.C., respectively.