Americans are not happy with Donald Trump’s focus on rolling back transgender rights and protections.
Among the flurry of disastrous polling data for the president following the first 100 days of his second term, one poll zeroed in on the administration’s unrelenting attacks on trans rights. Results from independent nonprofit news organization The 19th indicate that nearly half of Americans disapprove of the president’s focus on trans issues.
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On Monday, the outlet released the results of its 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll, which surveyed over 5,000 U.S. adults aged 18 and older, conducted online from April 11 to 21. The number of participants who said politicians should not focus on trans issues rose from 43 percent prior to the November election to 49 percent in April.
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That includes a majority of Republicans, 57 percent of whom agreed compared to 53 percent last year. According to The 19th, the number of Republicans who think lawmakers should focus on restricting trans rights also fell.
Worryingly, however, the poll also shows more evidence of Democrats backing away from trans issues following Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election. The president’s campaign infamously leveraged anti-trans misinformation and moral panic to turn out voters in November, and since then, some prominent Democrats have suggested that the party should focus less on trans issues.
According to The 19th, 42 percent of Democrats polled in April said they think politicians should not focus on trans issues, a nine percent increase from last September. The poll also found that both Democrats and Independent voters are less likely to think politicians should focus on protecting trans rights than they were prior to the election.
While a majority of Americans still think politicians are not informed enough to make fair policy decisions about gender-affirming care for minors, the number who say lawmakers are informed enough rose from 24 percent to 31 percent.
Additionally, 59 percent of those polled said they support trans adults accessing gender-affirming healthcare, while 55 percent said they oppose laws banning such care for minors. At the same time, only 43 percent of respondents said they support trans minors having the right to receive gender-affirming care, a drop from last year’s polling. Every major American medical association and leading world health authority has endorsed gender-affirming care for trans youth as evidence-based, safe, and in some cases lifesaving.
Trump has spent the first four months of 2025 issuing anti-trans executive orders targeting nearly every aspect of transgender Americans’ lives. On day one of his second term, he declared that the U.S. government would only recognize two biological sexes, male and female, and ordered federal agencies to stop issuing official documents that accurately reflect trans people’s gender identities.
He has also signed executive orders banning trans people from serving in the U.S. military, banning federal funding of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and calling on the U.S. Education Department to block federal funding of K–12 schools with anti-racist and trans-inclusive policies and curricula.
But as The 19th’s poll suggests, Americans are as unhappy with his anti-trans priorities as they are with his handling of the economy and immigration. Multiple polls released this month have found the president’s approval underwater, with Trump scoring lower than any other U.S. president in modern history.
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