A new poll shows – like many recent polls – that the public has turned largely against transgender people’s rights.

The poll from the liberal publication The Argument found broad opposition to transgender rights among U.S. registered voters, with only around a third of Americans supporting letting trans kids get puberty blockers with parental consent and a doctor’s recommendation. Over half supported requiring trans people to use the restroom associated with their sex assigned at birth. And a large majority – 60% – supported trans sports bans.

Related

Democrats reintroduce Trans Bill of Rights as “a moral commitment” to trans people

This poll isn’t an outlier. Recent polling has shown that even people who voted for Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris are more likely to support sports bans than oppose them.

It would be great if, as a journalist in LGBTQ+ media, I could bring you all better news. But the truth is that the backlash against transgender equality is real. Most people in the U.S. right now are more in agreement with the Trump administration when it comes to trans equality than they are with the Democratic Party.

Dive deeper every day

Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Meanwhile, it has become pretty popular among certain people on the left to accuse Democrats, who have largely held the line in favor of trans equality, of wanting to abandon trans people. This is in spite of Democrats in Congress getting anti-trans riders taken out of appropriations bills again and again, as Republicans have used those bills to attack trans rights for the past several years. This is after state legislatures vote either strictly or almost entirely along party lines when it comes to anti-trans bills, with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed.

Usually, the evidence cited for the Democrats’ supposed perfidy is a handful of statements on some podcasts over the past year. Rahm Emanuel’s name is often brought up as an example of how Democrats turned their backs on trans people, even though he hasn’t held elected office in years.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is the big exception to this, but even he has signed more pro-trans legislation into law than any other governor. While he made some bad statements about trans kids in sports on multiple podcasts last year, he hasn’t actually done anything with those views in terms of policy. California still has some of the strongest protections for trans kids in the country, and Newsom hasn’t so much as called for the state to pass a trans sports ban.

Considering that the Democrats are on the currently unpopular side of this issue – especially when it comes to school sports – it’s frankly astonishing that large swaths of Democratic elected officials haven’t broken ranks.

That hasn’t stopped people from criticizing Democrats for doing so online. One example of this mentality is Hasan Piker, an influential left-wing streamer (who is cis and straight) who got so mad at Democrats for allegedly abandoning trans people that he said they wanted to kill trans people.

“Trans people would not be safer under a Kamala Harris administration,” Piker said late last year, after Donald Trump had spent the year tearing apart all the trans protections put in place by the Biden-Harris administration. He accused Harris of making “concessions to transphobia” without specifying what they were, despite the fact that Trump made her support for trans rights a major issue in the 2024 elections.

And Piker is back in the news again, this time responding to a trans woman (Media Matters’ Ari Drennen) who pointed out that voting against Democrats in 2028 will undoubtedly hurt trans people.

“You’re yelling at one of the few people that does give a f**k about trans people,” Piker said on a stream last week, scolding Drennen. “They don’t give a f**k about you. They would literally shoot you in the f**king head if it meant it would secure them electoral wins. Shut the f**k up!”

So here we are in 2026: a decent-sized contingent on the left truly believes Democrats would sell trans people out if it would get them a single vote, to the point that they’re willing to curse out actual trans people. Meanwhile, there is a ton of evidence that Democrats actually could get a few more votes if they sold trans people out, but they have, by and large, not done so.

Why is that?

Part of it is that Democratic elected officials are more likely (compared to their constituents) to have met trans people in the past and know the facts on these issues, and we know that having met a trans person makes a person more likely to support trans rights.

Democratic electeds are also more likely to meet with activists who support trans rights, to meet with trans constituents who lobby them for their votes, to hear trans people’s stories… in short, to live in a media and social ecosystem that supports equal rights for all.

Another part is that, despite the knee-jerk cynical comments people make, Democratic elected officials often go into politics with a strong sense of morality, and poll numbers aren’t going to be enough to get them to abandon equal rights for all.

Last, while the poll numbers show a lack of support for trans rights, that hasn’t translated into votes. A couple of GOP campaigns last year leaned heavily into transphobia, and they lost. Some polling shows that, while Americans don’t necessarily support trans rights, they also don’t care that much about them.

So even if this is a losing issue for Democrats, they don’t have much of a reason to change their positions. And those Democrats who hold the line are unlikely to be removed from office.

And this is how Democratic elected officials ended up far to the left of their constituents when it comes to trans issues.

Republicans won big in 2024, and the results have been disastrous for trans people. Trump ordered all the executive departments and offices he controls to stop recognizing the existence of trans people. He has weaponized the federal government to go after state and local support for trans youth when it comes to their access to health care, their ability to get an equal education (including sports education), and their privacy. He banned trans people from serving in the military, stopped trans people from getting the correct gender markers on passports, and has made it a lot harder for trans people seeking safety to come to the U.S.

Because voters decided not to give Democrats any federal power for two years, they can’t do much about it other than fight these fights at the state and local levels.

To turn this ship around in 2028, it’s going to require people to make an honest assessment of where the parties stand. And if Democrats are doing this much in the face of negative public opinion, imagine what they’d do if the public actually supported equality.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.