In just the last three years, Americans of all viewpoints have experienced a significant shift against policies that promote transgender ideology. Since 2022, U.S. citizens have said they have become far more likely to favor laws barring the transgender industry from carrying out potentially sterilizing injections or life-altering surgeries of minors, protecting women’s spaces in public accommodations and in sports, and ending teachers’ ability to teach impressionable school students controversial and unpopular transgender ideology.

The sea change has taken place among Americans from every portion of the political spectrum — Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

Two out of three Americans (66%) say the law should see to it that people who identify as transgender cannot compete against members of the opposite sex in sporting events. (Or, in Pew’s language, Americans want their representatives to “[r]equire trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth.”)

A strong majority (56%) of Americans say that such transgender industry titans as Planned Parenthood should not be able to carry out often irreversible, experimental medical interventions on children. (Pew asked respondents if the law should “[b]an health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors.”)

A plurality also say restrooms should be restricted to those who have the appropriate biology (49%) and that public schools should stop indoctrinating students with extreme gender ideology (47%).

Americans were 23 points more likely to say people who identify as members of the opposite sex should use the restroom of their own sex than to say men should have access to women’s spaces: 49% of respondents told Pew they support laws to “require trans people to use public bathrooms that match their sex at birth,” compared to 26% who oppose such policies — roughly the same as the 25% of participants who would not express an opinion.

Additionally, U.S. citizens are twice as likely to say the government should not compel health insurance to cover what the survey described as “medical care for gender transitions” (53% vs. 22%). Yet many Democratic states compel taxpayers to pay for transgender procedures through the government insurance system, Medicaid.

The Pew Research Center reported this development under the negative headline, “Americans have grown more supportive of restrictions for trans people in recent years.”

“Views on these policies and several others have shifted in recent years, with Americans becoming more supportive of restrictions for transgender people, according to the survey of 5,097 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 10-17, 2025,” noted Pew. “Compared with 2022, Americans have become more supportive of laws that limit protections for trans people — and less supportive of laws aimed at safeguarding them,” groused the PRC.

Since 2022, the American people have become:

• 10 points more likely to say the predatory transgender industry should not be able to prey on minors
• 8 points more likely to support laws protecting sex-specific spaces such as restrooms
• 8 points more likely to oppose allowing transgender-identified athletes to compete against athletes of the opposite sex
• 6 points more likely to say public education should not smuggle transgender ideology into the classroom

The largest swings over the last three years came among moderates on the law and so-called “gender-affirming care” on minors: Independents had a 12-point shift against using civil rights laws to affirm people’s gender self-conception — and to punish those who refuse to comply. Independents moved firmly in favor of barring transgender medical interventions for children, from a middling 46% to a solid majority of 56%.

Democrats and LGBTQ-Identified Americans at Odds with Most Americans on Policy

While rank-and-file Democratic voters have steadily moved against the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, Democrats still lag behind average Americans on key aspects of the transgender political revolution. Registered Democrats are:

• 24 points less likely to support women’s restroom privacy laws and parental rights in education
• 21 points more likely to look positively on transgender procedures for children and placing girls’ physical safety at risk on the sports field

A separate Pew Research Center poll showed people who identify as LGBTQ are radically out of touch with the American mainstream.

• Two-thirds of average Americans say people who identify as transgender should not use the opposite sex’s restroom, two out of three (63%) of those in the LGBTQ movement favor opening women’s spaces to men.
• While 56% of Americans oppose transgender procedures for minors, 48% of people who identify as LGBTQ say they favor the gruesomely invasive practice.
• About half (47%) of all U.S. residents will tell pollsters they think public schools should omit gender-themed advocacy lessons, and a whopping 62% of LGBTQ-identified people say teachers have the right to introduce impressionable minds to an idiosyncratic, unpopular, ideological view of gender.

When it comes to political affiliation, LGBTQ-identified Americans are 10 times more likely to identify the Democratic Party as pliable to their agenda than the Republican Party: 59% saw the liberal party as “friendly,” as compared to just 5% who said the same of the GOP.

Polls Show Americans Recoiling from the LGBTQ Political Agenda

The Pew polls are the latest to show the American people trending away from transgender policies favored by America’s overexposed elite.

Transgender sports have proven a potent political issue in recent years. In the upcoming 2026 Georgia Senate race, first-term incumbent Democrat Jon Osoff is tied with a Republican — until voters learn that Osoff voted against the Men in Women’s Sports Act. That issue allows a Republican candidate to open a 14-point lead against Osoff (52% to 38%), according to a survey of Georgia voters conducted by the polling firm Cygnal.

• The percentage of Americans who believe same-sex relationships are “morally acceptable” fell by 7% in Gallup’s 2023 Values and Beliefs poll.
• Most Americans do not see “a married gay or lesbian couple raising children together” as “completely acceptable” (47% do), and even fewer believe an unmarried same-sex couple should raise a child (41%), according to a 2023 Pew Research Center.
• The left-of-center Public Religion Research Institute documented a 17-point shift against allowing people who identify as transgender from using the restrooms of the opposite sex between 2016 and 2022.

Democratic Force Raised to Counter Public Resistance

Many Americans had only a superficial and theoretical knowledge of transgender ideology during the 2022 survey, taken at the outset of the last Democratic administration. Biden-Harris officials immediately set about promoting the LGBTQ political agenda as part of their “whole-of-government” implementation of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Administration bureaucrats sued states that refused to house male prisoners, including sex offenders, in female correctional institutions. More visibly, the Biden administration invited trans-identified influencers to the White House, one of whom flashed his artificially enhanced breasts live on national television.

Americans have become far more knowledgeable about the impact of transgender procedures on children, and adults. The process begins with puberty blockers, which hold the potential for permanent sterilization. It then escalates to cross-sex hormone injections of estrogen for males and testosterone for females. The “trans train” ends with surgery: For girls, “top” surgery consists of a double mastectomy amputating both healthy breasts. For both males and females, “bottom” surgery entails the removal of a fully functional reproductive anatomy and fashioning either the arm into a faux phallus (phalloplasty) or the male reproductive member into an imitation womb (vaginoplasty). Both hold lifelong sexual and urological consequences, as well as the potential for infection.

The 2024 election turned largely as a referendum on the radical transgender viewpoint.

The second Trump administration has signaled it stands committed to closing the U.S. Department of Education, firing 50% of DOE employees. In the end, the president intends to return decisions over schooling, standards, and curriculum to the states, local communities, and parents.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” on February 5, which threatens to deny federal education funding to schools that allow males to compete with girls or expose young women to potential “endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.” A series of states have followed the president’s lead, calling the order “common sense.”

President Trump also invited Payton McNabb — a former high school volleyball player who sustained a concussion and lifelong brain injuries after a trans-identified teen boy spiked a ball into her head — to attend his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.

“Our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you,” President Trump said.