Pew: Americans don't need to be told what a woman is

AP Photo/John Bazemore

As you likely recall, our incoming associate justice on the Supreme Court is unable to define what a woman is. She’s not a biologist, after all. But a new survey conducted by Pew Research indicates that a growing majority of Americans suffers from no such confusion. And yet America is still largely a compassionate nation that doesn’t like to see people being discriminated against and they largely support protecting people from such discrimination in matters of employment, housing, and public spaces despite their curious beliefs about their own identity. And despite the huge amount of focus that the media and the entertainment world place on the entire “gender identity” concept, traditional beliefs in recent years have been growing, not shrinking.

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Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand Americans’ views about gender identity and people who are transgender or nonbinary. These findings are part of a larger project that includes findings from six focus groups on the experiences and views of transgender and nonbinary adults and estimates of the share of U.S. adults who say their gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.

As the United States addresses issues of transgender rights and the broader landscape around gender identity continues to shift, the American public holds a complex set of views around these issues, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults say there is at least some discrimination against transgender people in our society, and a majority favor laws that would protect transgender individuals from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces.

Responses to the two questions at the top of the poll seem to highlight both the skepticism I mentioned above and the tolerance that Americans still have. When asked if a man or woman can be different than the sex they were “assigned” at birth, 38% said that they could. That’s down from 44% who said the same in 2017. When asked if a man or woman’s sexist was determined at birth, 60% said that it was. That’s actually up from the 54% recorded five years ago.

But that doesn’t mean that Americans want to see open discrimination against those who identify as being transgender, particularly when it comes to employment, schools and access to public spaces. 64% said they either favored or strongly favored protecting trans people from such discrimination. Only 10% opposed such protections.

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But what does “discrimination” mean in this context? For that, we need to take a dive into the crosstabs and analyze some of the more specific underlying questions. For example, a plurality of 40% still either favors or strongly favors requiring transgender people to use the public bathrooms designated for their biological sex. 30% oppose such a policy, with just 16% strongly opposing.

The K-12 indoctrination push doesn’t do well in this survey either. 41% either favor or strongly favor making it illegal for school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary school. That’s slightly more than the 37% who would oppose such a law. It’s the question of protecting women’s sports where the margins really begin to separate, however. 58% favor a requirement that transgender athletes compete in sports as the gender they were assigned at birth, with 41% strongly favoring it. Conversely, just 17% oppose such a rule, with 8% opposing it strongly.

A strong plurality of 46% wants to make it illegal for doctors to provide “gender transition care” (such as puberty blockers or transition surgery) to children under the age of 18. Less than a third (30%) opposed such restrictions. Some language restrictions based on the whims of the transgender agenda didn’t do well either. While 47% felt it was at least somewhat important to refer to a person in transition by their new name (which I fully agree with), 26% said that making it mandatory to refer to them by their new pronouns was not important and 18% said it “should not be done.”

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You can read through the rest of the crosstabs to find out the percentages for questions involving “nonbinary” and other related descriptions. But the overall message in this survey seems to be clear. The entire mainstream media and entertainment industry are nearly 100% onboard with the entire transgender agenda, but they are woefully out of step with much of society.

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