A Majority of Americans are Against the Republican Anti-Transgender Legislation

As I noted in my post on On Lil Nas X, Gender Variance and Transphobic Legislation, the real paradox following from the current Republican attacks on trans kids is that the new anti-trans laws are not popular in the American electorate.

The new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll shows us that the current stigmatization of transgender kids has relatively little support.

One reason is probably that Americans are more likely to know someone trans these days.

Trans people humanized PBS reports:

In the PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, more than half of Americans say they personally know someone who is transgender. That includes 53 percent of Democrats, 39 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of independents.

People under the age of 40 are more than twice as likely as older Americans to personally know someone who is transgender. Sixty-three percent of Gen Z and millennial voters said they do, while just 28 percent of people over 74 years old said the same.

Five years ago, less than a third of Americans said they knew someone who was transgender, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

This is extremely important, as research shows that as soon as people see members of a marginalized group as fellow human beings it becomes much, much harder to dehumanize them.

The current support for same-sex marriage is partly caused by the fact that people now know gay and lesbian people, and therefore see them as people, as someone like themselves, and not as the alien “Other”.

The reason the Republicans focus their attacks on trans people today is precisely because it has become so much harder for them to demonize the other parts of the LGBT+ community.

I guess the reactionary members of the Republican Party now believe that the war against trans kids is their last chance to turn the clock back to the gender roles of the 19th century.

Take a look at the poll numbers (PBS again):

Fewer than three in ten people support state laws that prohibit gender-affirming care for minors or that criminalize providers of that care. Among Republicans, 26 percent support bills that prohibit this medical care, while 70 percent are opposed. That’s on par with where Democrats landed on the issue, with 26 percent in favor of such bills and 69 percent opposed.

There is a greater support for criminalizing those who provide gender transition-related care for minors among Trump-voters and Republicans, though, but even there we see no anti-trans majority.

Sports

Nor do we find any broad support for legislation prohibiting transgender students from joining sports teams that match their gender identity.

But when it comes to allowing trans students to compete as their real gender, the population is more equally divided:

For grade school, 50 percent of people said transgender children should be allowed to play on teams that match their gender identity, while 44 percent said they should not. In middle school, the split was 49 percent for, and 47 percent against. In high school, 47 percent were for and 48 percent against. And in college, 49 percent were in favor and 45 percent opposed.

So it might be that the Republicans are using doubts about “fairness” in sports to create a sense of crisis that will turn more people against trans people. That might, however, backfire spectacularly, precisely because it has become so much harder to dehumanize those trans.

Answers to the paradox

So why are the Republican doing this?

One reason may be that they want to retain control over the “red states”, states that the party controls today. Losing Georgia to Biden was a clear sign that their long term prospects are not good in many of these states.

It seems that the Republicans have already given up on changing people’s minds as far as America as a whole is concerned. They cannot win.

Many have therefore suggested that the party is now mobilizing its base — its core voters — in order to justify an undemocratic power grab. The current attacks on voter rights in many states and the timid Republican response to the January 6 coup attempt point in that direction. In this scenario Trans kids have become scapegoats used in to mobilize their prejudiced troops, much in the way the Jews were used by Hitler.

The numbers do show that Republicans are less likely to support the Equality Act, which aims at protecting LGBT+ people. 6 out of 10 Republicans will not use the law to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

So what can we learn from all of this?

The right wing transphobic traditionalists are desperate. They do not have the people on their side. This means that a broad mobilization of good people from all over American (and from all over the world) against these attacks has a great chance of succeeding.

Hang in there!

The poll of 1,266 adults was conducted April 7 through 13 and has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points for the full sample.Photo: Vladimir Vladimirov

Originally published at https://trans-express.lgbt.