There’s polling evidence to suggest the issue is more nuanced than you might think, but actions always speak louder than poll numbers.
Republicans surveyed by the left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress are nearly evenly split on whether the government should prevent transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.
The national polling data, shared exclusively with The 19th, suggests that GOP voters are not nearly as supportive of anti-trans bills being pushed by Republican state lawmakers across the country as some Republican politicians may want to believe. The data also carries significance for trans Republicans who spoke with The 19th about running in their local elections.
Forty-six percent of Republicans polled from February 25 to 27 by Data for Progress said they believe the government should leave decisions about gender-affirming care to families and their doctors, while 43 percent said the government should prevent trans youth from accessing that care. Eleven percent said they weren’t sure.
Still, a majority of Republican voters indicated in a later question that they supported Texas’ order to investigate families seeking gender-affirming care for their children, which also directs teachers and doctors to report trans children receiving that care.
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Several transgender conservatives told The 19th that watching GOP state lawmakers advance so many anti-trans bills has been frustrating — and that this poll suggests Republicans’ opinions on trans health care, as well as their knowledge of it, is more varied than those lawmakers may expect.
Jordan Evans, a trans Republican who has continued to run for local office in Massachusetts after transitioning in 2015 — when, to her knowledge, she became the first openly trans GOP elected official in the United States — said the split in opinion in the poll is comforting.
“I’ll take that as there are still enough people out there who understand why this is such a travesty and are willing to be like, ‘Well, I’m not sure if that’s OK,’” she said. “We need those people right now. … We need them to also speak up and speak out.”
To Jennifer Williams, the nation’s first openly transgender municipal chair for the Republican Party, the poll suggests that anti-trans bills may not be the winning issue that some Republicans want it to be.
“It’s abysmal, it’s terrible what’s happening. And it is purely done for political purposes,” Williams said.
“It’s embarrassing that there are Republicans who think that this is a way to build their name,” she said.
Some within the party, including the governors of Arkansas, North Dakota and, more recently, Utah, have taken a stance against anti-trans measures, including vetoing or vowing to veto them.
The poll’s split in opinion on the government’s role in gender-affirming care did not carry over to the latest developments in Texas. Responding to a separate question on that same survey, 59 percent of likely GOP voters said they either strongly support or somewhat support the order to investigate the families of trans children, while only 31 percent said they somewhat or strongly oppose it.
Charlotte Clymer, a Democrat and first trans board member of LPAC, a super PAC that funds LGBTQ+ women running for office, said the discrepancy between the questions follows a polling trend of voters being more open to supporting trans rights when asked about it in broader terms.
“I think most Republican voters, at the end of the day, don’t know what to think about trans issues,” she said. “The leaders of the party may want action against trans kids because they feel that this will help their bottom line politically, but … it’s not really clear that the base necessarily wants this.”
Th story cites some other poll data that has similar results. To which I say that’s nice, but if it’s true then Republican politicians don’t seem to be getting the message. You can blame that on primary voters if you want, but the candidates that win those primaries are still getting the votes from November Republicans. And as much as I think Greg Abbott’s campaign strategist is a piece of trash, I’ll concede he knows more about Republican voters than I do, and he thinks being strongly anti-trans is not only a winning issue for them, it’s one that will drive turnout for them. I hope he’s wrong about that, but I’m not going to put my faith in a couple of anodyne issue polls.
Because, again, ultimately it’s actions that matter.
It took Max three years and one letter, written with shaky hands, to tell his mother the truth.
He gave her the letter at the worst possible moment, with dinner on the stove and a house full of other kids needing her attention. But as soon as Amy started to read his words, she stopped, sat down and let it all sink in.
The child that she had given birth to and raised for 13 years as a daughter was telling her that he was, in fact, her son.
“I had one of those out-of-body experiences, where it felt like I was looking at myself reading the letter,” Amy remembered recently. “I could not believe what I was reading. I just wanted to cry.”
But instead, she took a deep breath and let her maternal instinct take over.
“I knew in that moment it was more important for me to hug him,” she said. “He needed to feel loved and accepted more than I needed to cry.”
The family spoke to The Texas Tribune on the condition of anonymity and are identified in this story with pseudonyms because they fear harassment. They are one of at least nine families facing child abuse investigations for providing gender-affirming care to their transgender children in the wake of a recent directive from Gov. Greg Abbott.
In that moment three years ago, Max explained to his mom that he’d been slowly coming out to friends and one of his brothers and he’d started going by his new, male-sounding name. He told her about his years of self-discovery and research into pronouns and puberty blockers and ways he could dress to hide his female form.
Amy felt like she’d just been swept up in a tornado and landed somewhere completely unfamiliar.
“I felt like I was grieving for my daughter … It took me about a week to realize [he] is healthy and he is safe, and he is exactly the same person he was a week ago,” she said. “And it’s me that needs to get over it.”
It’s been three years and while Amy is fully supportive of Max’s journey, she feels like she’s still playing catch-up. He’s the one educating her about the process of gender transition, including medical care like puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
So she was shocked when, three weeks ago, a child welfare worker showed up at their door, asking questions about whether Amy might be the one forcing Max to transition.
The investigations are in limbo while a legal challenge to the governor’s directive makes its way through the court system, leaving these families in a state of suspended terror.
Max, now 16, can’t understand why the government is targeting his family.
“The most upsetting thing about this for me is … the fact that they would accuse my mother of being a child abuser simply because of my identity,” Max said. “She’s made all of this possible for me and accepted me. That’s all I could ask for, and then the state comes out like, ‘Oh, actually, your mother is abusing you.’”
Compare Max’s mother to this guy, who hates trans kids, including his own trans kid, so much that he’s running for the Legislature to put his hatred of trans kids into law. You tell me how much those poll numbers matter next to that.