Most Voters Support Parental Role When Child Explores Gender Transition at School, Survey Finds
About 6 of 10 voters in America say schools should alert parents if their child wishes to change gender, name, or personal pronouns, and nearly 7 of 10 voters say school administrators should respect parents’ wishes if they don’t approve, a new poll finds.
The Scott Rasmussen national survey, conducted Monday and Tuesday among 1,000 registered voters, also found that, by a margin of 61% to 23%, those surveyed said they oppose requiring insurance companies to cover experimental surgeries and hormone treatments related to gender transitions.
“Statistically, parents are the most connected to, invested in, and protective of kids,” Katy Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, said Wednesday in an interview with The Daily Signal. “They are the adults with the greatest interest in children’s long-term well-being and thriving.”
“Not counselors. Not teachers. Not doctors,” added Faust, who leads a nonprofit children’s rights organization based in Seattle. “Parents are the ones who have to pick up the pieces when things go wrong.”
March 12 marked National Detransition Awareness Day, which provides an opportunity for those who have regretted undergoing experimental transgender medical practices to make their voices heard.
The Rasmussen survey results released Wednesday show Democrats split, with 39% of those surveyed saying insurance companies shouldn’t be required to cover so-called gender-affirming care for anyone and 38% saying they should.
By contrast, Republican voters overwhelmingly said insurers shouldn’t be required to cover such care, by a margin of 82% to 11%.
A total of 16% of voters said they were “not sure,” according to the survey results.
When asked whether insurance companies should be required to cover gender-transition procedures for minors, 69% of voters surveyed said they should not.
“Of course, a majority of Americans understand that when you’re talking about decisions that ultimately may involve significant medical risk, lifelong harm, and irreversible damage to children, those decisions must go through parents,” Faust told The Daily Signal.
Fully 62% of survey participants said employers shouldn’t be required to pay for insurance that covers experimental gender-transition treatments—such as hormone therapy, chemical castration, or other disfiguring surgeries—if doing so would violate the employer’s deeply held religious beliefs.
When asked whether biological men who identify as women should be allowed to share spaces with biological female victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, 63% said no.
Another 17% of voters said this shared space should be allowed, while 19% said they are “not sure.”
Rasmussen’s survey also found that 56% of participants said that when biological men who identify as women are allowed to use women’s shelters designed for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, it creates more risk and trauma for the women.
“While the Rasmussen results are encouraging and indicative of increasing skepticism of the government’s attempt to shoehorn its gender madness into classrooms, hospitals, and government grantees like domestic abuse shelters, we need better numbers and more skepticism,” Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
Perry added:
We need more courage, more common sense, more commitment to repudiating the notion that biology is anything less than immutably hardwired into our every cell, and that sex is not ‘assigned,’ but recognized.
Truth is truth, no matter how it makes someone else feel. Americans need to stand up and proclaim once and for all that as far as gender identitarianism is concerned, the emperor has no clothes.
Rasmussen, a veteran pollster, is president of the public opinion research firm RMG Research Inc.
The margin of error for this survey is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, according to Rasmussen.
