Generation Confused
Why Support for Trans Rights May Be Fading
Last week, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to trans rights by upholding a Tennessee ban on gender care for trans minors. I wrote about the case here. This court has sometimes deviated sharply from public opinion - overturning Roe v Wade comes to mind - but not with this ruling. A Pew survey from February found that support for trans rights declined from 2022 to 2025 among all adults, regardless of political identification. Support for bathroom bans increased from 41% to 49%, including a 5-point increase among Democrats. Support for care bans for minors increased from 46% to 56%. Support for legislation protecting trans people from discrimination declined from 64% to 56%. This trend held across all six questions included in the poll. What’s going on? Is this just the impact of intense campaigning by Republicans against trans rights?
Sarah McBride, the only openly trans member of Congress, recently offered an interesting hypothesis. When asked about the sharp drop in support for trans rights, McBride said, “There was a transfer of support from the LGB to the T because it’s all one acronym.” People who came to support same-sex marriage didn’t want to be wrong on trans rights. “They were like, I remember not understanding gay people. And because of that, I remember being wrong on (same-sex) marriage. And I don't want to be wrong again just because I don't understand trans people. So I'll get on board with trans rights even though I don't understand trans people. And that support was a mile wide but an inch deep. It was a house built on sand.”
Not everyone agrees with McBride’s take; there’s an ongoing debate about the right path for the trans rights movement, one I have neither the expertise nor lived experience to weigh in on. However, McBride’s theory does align with something I discovered in my research. I interviewed mothers raising teens in a progressive region of the US about how they learned about gender and sexuality growing up and how they talked about it with their kids and discovered a stark generational transition. My participants grew up in a rigidly heterosexual climate: 50 of my 51 participants either didn’t hear anything about homosexuality in childhood or heard mostly bad things. Rose1, who knew from an early age that she was attracted to girls, told me she’d never seen a happy homosexual or lesbian in a movie or television show, only ‘tragic gay’ tropes. Another recalled the great scandal that rocked her town in 1983 when her gym teacher left her husband for a woman. My participants experienced the pain of being closeted or witnessed it in the lives of their friends. Most didn’t encounter gay activism until their 20s.
These women witnessed the historic transition of gay rights and as they had kids, they aspired to do better than their parents’ generation. They raised their children next to same-sex families or formed ones themselves. They tried not to assume their children were heterosexual. One told me about her family conversations, “we say, ‘when a boy likes a girl, or boy,’ you know, we just include it. We try not to be so limited in our descriptions.” They were progressive and open-minded2. Then the gender revolution happened and knocked them off their feet.
Some of my participants had children come out as trans or nonbinary and faced the complicated reckoning of discovering their child wasn’t exactly who they’d imagined them to be. Others had children come home from school talking about a friend changing their name and/or pronouns. As I wrote previously, many turned to their children for guidance; they needed guidance because they felt so lost. They wanted to be on the right side of history, but they didn’t fully understand gender diversity, and apart from their children, they felt they didn’t have anyone to ask. This kind of support, though sincere, may be more changeable because it’s not rooted in the robust understanding that grows through incremental social change.
The thing is, it all seemed to happen so quickly. Of course trans people always existed and behind the scenes were decades of trans activism, but to those not paying attention it just seemed like everyone was suddenly talking about pronouns.
This kind of change takes time to sink in. Think about the struggle for gay marriage. On its face, same-sex orientation is an easier issue than trans and nonbinary genders: being attracted to someone is a pretty universal sentiment, but few of us will experience gender dysphoria. Same-sex orientation also requires less social adjustment than gender diversity. You can work with someone for years and not know their sexual orientation or meet their partner, but you can’t work even one day with someone without knowing - or assuming - their pronouns. We give people their gender, and they give us ours every day, in a thousand daily interactions. And if you’re used to assuming people’s gender from their outside appearance, and suddenly you have to ask for their pronouns and declare yours, it’s bound to feel uncomfortable.
I love this quote by Judith Butler, a pioneer of gender theory. It’s an answer they (Butler is nonbinary) gave on The New Yorker podcast when asked whether they ever get people’s pronouns wrong. Butler said, “I struggle, I err. I find it difficult to always keep clear who wants to be called what. And I have to ask people, and sometimes I have to ask them a couple of times. And especially as one gets older, one has to ask many things a couple of times.” Even Judith Butler gets confused!
And yet, even though acceptance of same-sex orientation should be easier than understanding trans and nonbinary identities, consider how long it took for gay and lesbian rights to gain mainstream respectability: 65 years from the start of organized advocacy to marriage equality. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act defined marriage as between a man and a woman; just two decades later, same-sex marriage was the law of the land.
What does that mean? That a defeat - like the one handed down last week by the Supreme Court - is not the end of the road. That’s cold comfort for a trans person whose care was taken away or for the parents of one, but it also offers hope. The arc of trans rights is longer than it should be, but it may still bend toward justice.
Not her real name
To be clear, I’m including myself in this description.