(LifeSiteNews) — A new poll of registered voters finds that protecting children from surgical and chemical “gender transition” procedures has broad bipartisan support, contrary to the persistent narrative by the Democrat Party and the corporate press that state laws to do so are “extreme.”
The Daily Wire reported on the findings of the national poll conducted last month by CRC Research on behalf of the 85 Fund, a conservative nonprofit. The poll surveyed 1,600 Americans from across the political spectrum, with respondents breaking down as 30 percent Republican, 35 percent Democrat, and 34 percent independent.
Sixty-seven percent overall approved of laws prohibiting minors from being subjected to cross-sex hormones or sex-reassignment surgeries. That position includes 73 percent of Republicans as expected but also was agreed to by 61 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents. Eighty-one percent of respondents also agreed that parents have a right to know if their children exhibit signs of gender dysphoria in public schools, again with broad bipartisan consensus.
“This poll confirms that gender ideology is a unifying issue across party lines and a vast majority of Americans support parental rights and restricting irreversible medical transition interventions for minors,” parental rights advocate January Littlejohn of the group Do No Harm told the Wire. “Americans also oppose our government pushing community school health clinics that will further threaten parental rights.”
“These figures decisively show that voter support for family involvement in children’s lives transcends political ideology,” Parents Defending Education president Nicole Neil concurred. “These numbers are consistent with previous polls conducted by PDE, the Becket Fund, and others — which is why it’s absolutely mind-boggling that education officials seem to consider it their sacred duty to spend finite taxpayer resources encouraging students to keep secrets from their loved ones, undermining the parent-child relationship in the process.”
It is an article of progressive faith that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception which individuals are free to change at will. But according to modern biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics. For Christians, the issue is further settled by Genesis 1:27, which teaches that God created both sexes in His image.
Yet for years, LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as beauty contests, school homecomings, and athletic competitions. Critics say their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, the most grievous of which being to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves.
Evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners have attested to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such situations is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Last summer, the Biden administration’s own U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report that acknowledged “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Regardless, President Joe Biden has given uncompromising support for all major aspects of the LGBT movement, including reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding White House events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage transitions as “close to sinful,” promoting underage transitions, (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.
CRC Research’s findings are consistent with previous surveys that have found strong majority opposition to other aspects of the transgender agenda, such as forcing female students to compete against biological males in sex-specific athletic programs.
Such polls also serve as a counterweight to pervasive narratives that Republicans are “extremist” on social issues, rooted mostly in the general public’s receptiveness to some aspects of the pro-abortion message. Several liberal Republicans have advocated moderating the GOP’s pro-life stance to appease such sentiments, but the unpopularity of Biden and allies’ gender agenda gives conservative candidates an opening to refocus the subject of “extremism” without compromising their own values.