A February 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that majorities of US adults support laws restricting trans people in sports and healthcare, with support rising by up to ten points since 2022. These numbers reflect years of coordinated political campaigning rather than settled values, and opinion on a group most people never personally encounter is especially susceptible to that kind of sustained pressure.

What the poll actually found

The Pew Research Center surveyed 5,097 US adults between 10 and 17 February 2025. Two-thirds, 66%, say they favour laws requiring trans athletes to compete in sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth. Fifty-six per cent support banning healthcare professionals from providing gender-affirming care to minors. Nearly half support requiring trans people to use bathrooms that match their birth sex, and 47% support making it illegal for public schools to teach about gender identity in elementary school. At the same time, 53% oppose requiring health insurance companies to cover medical care for gender transitions.

There is one number in there I want to place next to the others: 56% of those same adults also say they support policies protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces. People's views are not as simple or coherent as a single headline can carry.

These numbers did not appear from nowhere

Since 2022, support for restrictions on trans people has risen by six to ten percentage points across several questions. Support for anti-discrimination protections has fallen by eight points. If you only look at those shifts in isolation, they can feel like an overwhelming tide. But ask yourself what changed between 2022 and February 2025, and the answer is not difficult to find.

The Trump administration signed a series of executive orders targeting trans people shortly after he took office, including orders banning trans women and girls from women's sports and cutting federal funding for gender-affirming care for young people. These were not quiet policy adjustments; they were designed to be visible, talked about, and debated. They were accompanied by years of political campaigning, in Congress, in state legislatures, in right-wing media, that made trans people, and especially trans children, a central target.

Opinion polls do not measure settled, considered values in the abstract. They measure what people think when asked, at a particular moment, shaped by what they have recently heard, read, and been told to worry about. When a subject has been saturated with frightening, misleading framing for years on end, the polling tends to reflect that saturation. That is not a revelation about what Americans really believe about their trans neighbours. It is a reflection of the power of sustained, co-ordinated messaging.

Most people answering these questions do not know a trans person

There is something particular about polling on a group that most respondents have little or no direct experience of. Trans people make up a small percentage of the population. Many are not out to everyone around them. Many are not visible in the ways the culture war framing suggests. So when someone answers a survey question about trans athletes or trans healthcare for minors, they are typically not thinking of anyone they know. They are thinking of a political construct, the figure that has been described to them, often in alarming terms, over months and years of relentless coverage.

People who do know trans people personally tend to see things differently. That finding has held across multiple surveys over time. Personal connection cuts through abstraction in a way that political messaging cannot easily reach. The problem is that the current political environment is actively working to reduce that connection, by removing trans young people from schools, by cutting healthcare access, by making trans life harder and less visible.

The partisan picture is important, and it is not monolithic

Pew's data shows that 79% of Republicans support banning healthcare professionals from providing gender-affirming care to minors, up from 72% in 2022. Among Democrats, 35% now say the same, up from 26%. Those shifts among Democrats are the ones that deserve real attention, because they suggest the messaging has had some purchase beyond its obvious base. But even here, the partisan gaps remain wide: Republicans are 43 to 50 points more likely than Democrats to support restricting trans protections. Democrats are more than 30 points more likely than Republicans to support policies that safeguard trans people.

The picture is not of a country that has uniformly turned against trans people. It is of a country where the loudest, best-funded, most politically organised voice on this subject has been one specific political movement, and where the numbers have moved in that movement's direction. That is a different thing.

What gets lost when we only read the headline

When I read surveys like this, what stays with me is not the percentage who favour restrictions. It is the real people those restrictions affect. The teenager whose access to healthcare has just been cut off. The young athlete who has trained for years and now cannot compete. The parent who is watching their child's legal recognition erode in real time. These are not abstractions, and no poll captures them.

The numbers matter because they will be cited in courts, in legislatures, in debates about what the public wants. They will be used to argue that restrictions on trans lives are what Americans actually believe in. But opinion that has been shaped by years of misleading campaigning is not the same as a considered public value. And a majority opinion is not, by itself, a moral one. Majorities have been wrong before, on questions precisely like this one, and the polling eventually reflected that too.

Trans people exist. They have always existed. The question was never whether public opinion would permit that. The question is what kind of society we are building around them, and what it costs when we let fear, rather than knowledge, drive the answer.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.