Two Years Later, Opinions on Trans Rights Have Barely Budged

The numbers are moving — just not in the same direction for everyone

If one were to ask 100 informed voters about the types of issues at the center of the Culture War debate, I think that 20 years ago two would clearly be the front runners: gay marriage and abortion. If I were to ask 100 informed voters that same question today, I’m pretty sure that abortion would come up a lot, but same-sex marriage would have probably faded quite a bit in the public’s consciousness. Instead, I would argue that the rights of transgender Americans would be much more “top of mind” for folks who pay even a little attention to the political debates in this country.

It’s hard to poll on trans issues because the debate takes on so many forms. There are battles over bills designed around bathroom access, legislation about whether high school students can compete in sports that don’t match their birth gender, and strong debate over whether teachers can use different pronouns with students without notifying their parents. In the previous dustup about homosexuality, the question really centered on one thing: should a same-sex couple have the right to marry one another?

A couple of months ago, The Argument pulled together a really extensive poll about transgender rights. The title of the report tells the whole story: The trans rights backlash is real. A majority of voters would support a national law requiring people to use public restrooms that correspond with their birth sex. Sixty percent believed that high school athletes should be required to compete with people who share their birth sex. What was even more surprising was that the latter question almost evenly divided Kamala Harris voters: 38% were in favor and 41% were opposed.

One thing we don’t have a lot of in this arena is longitudinal data about how opinions have moved over time. Because of the newest release of the Cooperative Election Study, I can now compare answers to the same question from October 2023 to October 2025 — before election season had really heated up, and then a year after it was over.

The question under scrutiny here is: “Make it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition.” And I think we can see a bit of movement in the direction of permissiveness over the last few years. In the full sample, support for the ban went from 66% in 2023 to 63% in 2025. Obviously not a huge shift, but it is statistically significant.

The reason for that is a big movement among Democrats and Independents. For Democrats, opposition dropped from 45% to 39% in two years, but it declined even more among Independents — from 70% to 64%. It’s important to note, though, that even today almost two-thirds of Independents favor a ban on medical care for gender transition for minors. Notice the opposition among Republicans, though. It’s rock solid and near unanimous. It’s basically orthodoxy in the GOP now. I can’t imagine a Republican running for office in 2026 who won’t make it a centerpiece of their campaign.

When I analyze the results by generation, I see essentially the same pattern as the previous graph: opposition has declined, but by a very marginal amount for most groups. The big exception is Boomers. In 2023, 71% of them favored a ban on gender transition for minors. By 2025, that was down to 66%. That’s not nothing. There’s also a three-point dip among Gen X. You can make a reasonable argument that older Americans have moved more on this than younger ones.

Among Millennials and Gen Z, the shift has been barely noticeable — just two points for Millennials and a single point for Gen Z, which was not statistically significant. It’s also worth keeping the overall levels in mind. Even a majority of Gen Z favors a ban on gender transition for minors. This data largely comports with the polling from The Argument.

Speaking of generations, I wanted to verify an interesting finding from an earlier post where younger men are significantly more socially conservative than younger women. Among people born in the 2000s, young women were sixteen points more likely to agree that “Acceptance of transgender people is a positive change” than men of the same age.

Among older generations, the story isn’t that interesting. Boomer men are more in favor of the ban than Boomer women — that was true in both 2023 and 2025. As we’ve seen, though, there’s been an erosion of opposition across the board for Boomers, down 4–5 points. For Gen X, the same general pattern holds: men express more opposition than women, but the drop in that share is much smaller than it was for Boomers.

The bottom row, however, reveals a trend worth highlighting. For Millennials in 2023, the gender gap on this question was just two points — not significant in any way. In 2025, it widened to four points, though it’s still not statistically significant. Millennial men are more supportive of a ban on gender transition for minors than Millennial women.

But check out the big movement in Gen Z. In 2023, there was a substantial gender gap: men were eight points more conservative than women. In 2025, that gap has narrowed to just three points and is no longer statistically significant. Why did the gap close? Gen Z women moved two points in the conservative direction — I would have never guessed that before doing this analysis. Meanwhile, men moved three points to the left. So maybe the social issues divide in Gen Z is a bit overblown. We need more data.

Let’s bring religion into the mix.

The big thing I see here is that macro-level shift we noticed up top: the share of Americans who oppose gender transition for minors has dipped ever so slightly in the last couple of years. There aren’t any massive movements in these comparisons — just a gentle wave pushing nearly everyone a bit to the left. White evangelical support for a ban has dropped by three points in two years. It’s down four points among the mainline. For white Catholics, the drop is two points, though it’s not statistically significant.

There’s also movement among atheists, with support for the ban sliding from 35% in 2023 to 29% in 2025. It’s also down four points among nothing-in-particulars. The biggest drop by far, though, is among non-white Catholics. In 2023, 69% of them favored a ban. In 2025, it was only 61%. Make of that what you will.

Not a single group in this analysis has seen a statistically significant increase in support for the ban. In very small groups, the point estimates do rise — nine points among Orthodox Christians and six points for Buddhists — but those samples are small, fewer than 200 in each survey year, which means the confidence intervals are enormous.

Let’s throw partisanship in with religion now. I had to eliminate some groups because the sample sizes were just too small to tell us much.

The hollow circles are the 2023 estimates; the filled ones reflect 2025. It’s readily apparent that Democrats have seen an erosion in support for a ban on gender transition for minors. Among non-white evangelical Democrats, it’s down about six points. It’s down even more for Catholics — 13 points for white Catholics and 15 points for non-white Catholics. For atheists, it’s a four-point dip. It’s really across the board — except for LDS Democrats, where opposition actually rose a bit, though this is a very small group.

For Republicans, the movement is hard to characterize. For a whole bunch of groups, it’s essentially nonexistent — that’s the case for evangelicals, Catholics, and Latter-day Saints. A handful of groups actually grew more supportive of the ban over time: Black Protestants, atheists, and agnostics. The only group that really moved left was mainline Protestant Republicans, whose opposition to a ban dropped by five percentage points between 2023 and 2025.

So what do we make of all this? It’s fair to say that support for a ban on children’s gender transition has softened just a little in the last few years — 2–3 percentage points. Not enough to change how the country feels on this in any meaningful way, but it’s noteworthy that opinion on this topic seems to be liberalizing at all, given how politicized the discussion has become.

What really sticks with me is that this is yet another example of partisanship driving a wedge into the electorate. Democrats have moved left on this issue. Republicans have either held their position or become slightly more conservative. This is not being driven by religious affiliation.

You know how I know that? Look at the two groups that were closest on this issue in 2023: Black Protestants and non-white Catholics. The gap between Democrats and Republicans was about thirteen points in that first sample. You know what it is now? Twenty-seven points for Black Protestants and 23 points for non-white Catholics. The parties have sorted themselves out on this issue, and the voters are falling in line.

These aren’t debates about culture. They are debates about partisanship. And the rank and file are lining up behind their teams.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.