Transgender issues have become a serious liability for Democrats, according to a new poll by the Substack-based, left-leaning publication The Argument. The poll, which surveyed 3,003 registered voters nationally between February 4 and 10, asked about hot-button policy questions related to gender self-identification, including access to bathrooms, participation in sports teams, teaching gender identity in schools, and the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on minors. In all those cases, a majority opposed the policies favored by the progressive faction of the Democratic Party. The only area in which a majority supported trans policies was protection from discrimination in housing and employment.
The respondents’ critical views on gender medicine are consistent with other recent polling. Opposition to gender surgeries for minors (62 percent opposed versus 27 percent in support) and to puberty blockers (56 percent versus 33 percent) echoed the results of a New York Times/Ipsos poll from last year, which found that 71 percent of voters—including 54 percent of Democrat or Democratic-leaning voters—thought puberty blockers and hormones should not be offered to adolescents between the ages of ten and 18.
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Read between the lines of the poll, though, and a more interesting and surprising finding emerges. The questions about pediatric gender medicine contained a crucial caveat: Should hormones and surgeries be allowed “when deemed medically necessary by doctors, with parental consent?” Despite this phrasing, respondents’ critical views on gender medicine remained strong.
The poll’s results thus imply that Americans don’t trust doctors—in particular, it would seem, doctors with “gender” expertise—to make the right decision when it comes to helping children and adolescents who experience discomfort with their sex.
It’s not just conservatives, either. Thirty-eight percent of Americans who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 said that they would oppose a law permitting doctors to make surgical determinations for minors in consultation with parents, while 31 percent said the same about hormones. An additional 13 percent and 12 percent of Harris voters were “not sure” about surgeries and hormones, respectively. That means that more than half of Harris voters, known for their higher trust in scientific authority, are unwilling to “trust the experts” when it comes to gender medicine for kids.
This finding is potentially more significant than the declining levels of support for “gender-affirming care” in minors. If my interpretation of the survey results is plausible, it means that gender medicine is imposing real costs on the credibility and trustworthiness of medicine as an institution.
Two additional facts about the survey deserve mention. First, as The Argument’s Lakshya Jain points out, a polling aggregate by 538 last year found that President Trump’s agenda was unpopular on almost all fronts—except “LGBTQ” issues (+16 points). The next “best” issue for the administration’s agenda was energy policy (+5 points). Respondents to The Argument’s poll reported similar levels of value alignment with Democratic and Republican Party approaches to “issues related to gender identity and sexual preferences.”
Progressive elites commonly frame GOP-backed transgender policies as “attacks on LGBTQ rights.” But almost no national policy debates remain concerning issues pertaining to “LGB,” and as gay and lesbian Americans have become some of the most vocal critics of Democrat-backed transgender policies, the credibility of the progressive framing of these issues is fading.
Indeed, The Argument asked respondents about their support for same-sex marriage and found that 65 percent agreed (and 27 percent disagreed) that “same-sex marriage should receive the same legal rights and protections as traditional marriages.” One would expect to see these numbers reversed if the public strongly associated trans issues with LGB issues.
The Argument’s poll also possibly underestimates public opposition to “gender-affirming care” for minors. Polling is a notoriously imprecise art. One particular problem involves baseline knowledge—that is, how much respondents really know about a subject. If you’re going to survey voter sentiment about, say, the generosity of the American welfare state, voters unaware of the myriad welfare policies that operate through the tax code or through regulation of private entities may rate American welfare as much less generous than it actually is, and they might be inclined to say that American government should do more than it’s already doing.
It’s unclear how much the average American knows about, say, the incidence of gender surgeries in minors. Transgender activists have at times emphatically denied that such procedures ever take place, despite unassailable evidence that they do, including in girls as young as age 12. Alternatively, respondents may believe that these procedures are extremely rare, though the best available evidence—and a conservative estimate—suggests that about 1,000 girls under age 18 undergo mastectomies each year for purposes of gender transition.
The same goes for hormones. Readers of many liberal media outlets may believe that doctors prescribe them to adolescents only after lengthy and rigorous mental-health assessments and are therefore extremely rare. They may believe that stories about rushed assessments and weak guardrails are mere scaremongering, or at least the exceptions in a field otherwise characterized by caution.
The evidence points in the opposite direction. Published data suggests that roughly one in 1,000 American adolescents received a prescription for hormones for gender-transition purposes between 2018 and 2022. That’s the same prevalence as Type-2 diabetes in adolescents, which public health authorities have called “an awakening epidemic.”
Given how infrequently left-of-center media report these numbers—and how they spin or misleadingly frame them when they do—it’s reasonable to assume that the average liberal-leaning American believes these procedures are much rarer than the evidence demonstrates. Anecdotally, I have spoken to quite a few Democrat-leaning voters who are skeptical that doctors are performing mastectomies on teen girls.
On the other hand, it’s potentially significant that The Argument conducted its survey in the days immediately after the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) made national headlines with its recommendation to delay gender surgeries until at least age 19. ASPS acknowledged not only the unfavorable risk-benefit profile of surgeries but also the lack of good evidence for endocrine interventions. The American Medical Association promptly declared its agreement with ASPS on surgeries. We can only speculate about how this news affected the results of The Argument’s survey.
As if to prove how disconnected Democratic elites are from their own voters, the day after The Argument’s poll came out, 106 members of Congress penned a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisting that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are “medically-necessary, evidence-based care.” The only citation they provided for this claim is a report published last year in Utah, which is not a systematic review, and which contradicts the findings of every actual systematic review to date.
Conveniently left out of the letter was any mention of surgeries, and therefore also the retraction of support for these procedures by ASPS and the AMA—evidence, it would seem, that Democratic politicians are letting political considerations dictate their position in this area.
The gap between elected Democrats and voters on this and other issues is largely due to the chokehold that progressive activists and nonprofits—whose views represent roughly 10 percent of the American electorate—have over candidates and the party apparatus. As Alicia Nieves argues in a new piece for Compact, “progressive capture” remains a core problem for Democratic electoral prospects and governing ability.
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