Only 28 percent of Americans support former President Barack Obama’s pro-transgender claim that the federal government should decide bathroom policies in elementary and secondary schools, says a new poll by Rasmussen Reports.
In contrast, 36 percent said local governments should set “bathroom policies” governing youths who say they want to live as members of the opposite sex. Another 28 percent of respondents said state government should set the rules for transgender disputes, according to the poll.
That adds up to 64 percent opposition and only 28 percent support for federal rule.
The two-to-one opposition is bad news for progressives, who are currently campaigning for federal politicians and federal judges to impose a national policy that would allow people to change their legal sex by simply declaring they have the “gender identity” of an opposite-sex person.
This week, President Donald Trump announced he is discarding Obama’s May 2016 national K-12 pro-transgender policy and is delegating the issue to state and local governments. However, his administration has not announced whether it opposes the gay groups’ demand that “gender identity” should determine a person’s legal sex.
The new Rasmussen poll also shows that only 38 percent of respondents favor “allowing transgender students to use the bathrooms of the opposite biological sex.” That policy was opposed by 49 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, 36 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of adults who say they are neither Democratic nor Republican. The Feb. 22 to 23 poll included 1,000 adults.
The public opposition to the transgender identity-before-biology ideology increases when the questions are asked about younger schoolkids. For example, an April poll by Civitas showed that only 7 percent of 600 North Carolinians strongly supported a judge’s demand “ordering girls and boys in public middle schools to share locker rooms, bathroom, and shower facilities.” The demand was strongly opposed by 72 percent of respondents.
The new poll by Rasmussen only asked about bathrooms, and so doesn’t reveal political support for the underlying political demand by gay groups that a person’s “gender identity,” not their biological sex, should determine whether they are male or female. In March, the Supreme Cour this expected to hear a case in which gay advocates want the judges to redefine the meaning of “sex” in a 1972 sexual discrimination law from biological sex to “gender identity.”
That’s a revolutionary demand, because if individuals can freely flip their sex from male to female or vice versa, then the nation’s many single-sex institutions will face enormous legal pressure to admit people of the opposite biological sex. For example, shelters for battered women may be forced to open their doors to men who claim battery, women’s sports leagues will be forced to admit bigger and stronger men who claim to be women, and schoolbooks and parenting guides used by government grantees would be forced to define “women” merely as people who say they are women, effectively discarding the nation’s cultural history of women, girls and feminists.
Already, the Boy Scouts of America have decided to admit girls who want to live as boys, and have also begun changing their language to downplay their prior focus on the needs of young boys. Similarly, sports leagues for women have been forced to admit biological males and also to admit girls who are taking muscle-boosting male testosterone hormones.
Also, the progressive trend is forcing progressives to rebuke ordinary Americans who don’t want men walking into the public bathrooms used by their young children. That politically questionable stance was highlighted by CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who entangled himself in a Twitter fight when he suggested that a father was being intolerant for saying he doesn’t want his 12 year-old-daughter to share a public toilet with men who are trying to live as women.
Cuomo retreated from the fight by claiming that a court would decide if the gender-before-sex law would create safety problem by allowing sexual predators into bathrooms. But he ignored the larger issue that women’s bathrooms– and locker rooms and sports leagues — would also become open to men who say they are women if fixed biology is deemed less important than changeable “gender identity.”
A recent poll by a pro-transgender group at UCLA showed that only 23 percent of Americans think people should be allowed to switch their legal sex without any tests or approval by government agencies.
Update: A February poll of 2,000 registered voters by Politico and Morning Consult showed that the transgender agenda is strongly supported by just 23 percent of respondents, strongly opposed by 33 percent and somewhat opposed by 13 percent.
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