Transgender issues are a strength for Trump, AP-NORC poll finds

WASHINGTON (AP) - About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Donald Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll - a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans.

But support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youth.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey conducted this month found there’s more support than opposition on allowing transgender troops in the military, while most don't want to allow transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and oppose using government programs to pay for gender-affirming health care for transgender youth.

Schuyler Fricchione, a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother from northern Virginia, is one of those who opposes the government paying for gender-affirming care, especially for young people.

She said she doesn't want people to make major changes that they might later regret. But she said that because of her Catholic faith, she doesn’t want to exclude transgender people from public life. "It’s very important to me that everyone understands their dignity and importance as a person."

"It is something I am kind of working through myself," she said. "I am still learning."

About two-thirds of U.S. adults agree with President Donald Trump that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by their biological characteristics at birth.

The poll found that Republicans overwhelmingly believe gender identity is defined by sex at birth, but Democrats are divided, with about half saying gender identity can differ from biological characteristics at birth. The view that gender identity can’t be separated from sex at birth view contradicts what the American Medical Association and other mainstream medical groups say: that extensive scientific research suggests sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.

A push against the recognition and rights of transgender people, who make up about 1% of the nation’s population, has been a major part of Trump’s return to the White House - and was a big part of his campaign.

He has signed executive orders calling for the government to classify people by unchangeable sex rather than gender, oust transgender service members and kick transgender women and girls out of sports competitions for females. Those actions and others are being challenged in court, and judges have put many of his efforts on hold.

Despite being a hot-button issue overall, a big portion of the population is neutral or undecided on several key policies.

About 4 in 10 people supported requiring public schoolteachers to report to parents if their children are identifying at school as transgender or nonbinary. About 3 in 10 opposed it and a similar number was neutral.

About the same portion of people - just under 4 in 10 - favored allowing transgender troops in the military as were neutral about it. About one-quarter opposed it.

Tim Phares, 59, a registered Democrat in Kansas who says he most often votes for Republicans, is among those in the middle on that issue.

One on hand, he said, "Either you can do the job or you can’t do the job." But on the other, he added, "I’m not a military person, so I’m not qualified to judge how it affects military readiness."

This month, a divided U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump’s administration to enforce a ban on transgender people in the military while legal challenges proceed, a reversal of what lower courts have said.

About half oppose allowing government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender-affirming medical care, such as hormone therapy and surgery, for transgender people 19 or older. About two-thirds oppose it for those under 19.

And on each of those questions, a roughly equal portion of the populations support the coverage or is neutral about it.

One of Trump’s executive orders keeps federal insurance plans from paying for gender-affirming care for those under 19. A court has ruled that funding can’t be dropped from institutions that provide the care, at least for now.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration this month released a report calling for therapy alone and not broader gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. Twenty-seven states have bans on the care for minors, and the Supreme Court is expected to rule in coming months over whether the bans can hold.

While Democrats are divided on many policies related to transgender issues, they’re more supportive than the population overall. There is no anguish over the issue or other transgender policy questions for Isabel Skinner, a 32-year-old politics professor in Illinois.

She has liberal views on transgender people, shaped partly by her being a member of the LGBTQ+ community as a bisexual and pansexual person, and also by knowing transgender people.

She was in the minority who supported allowing transgender students to use the public-school bathrooms that match their gender identity - something that at least 14 states have passed laws to ban in the last five years.

"I don't understand where the fear comes from," Skinner said, "because there really doesn't seem to be any basis of reality for the fear of transgender people."

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Mulvihill reported from New Jersey.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,175 adults was conducted May 1-5, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.