The June Supreme Court ruling upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors is a signal that more anti-LGBTQ legislation is on the way, said Orion Rummler, reporter for The 19th, an independent nonprofit news organization.
“We’ve seen an explosion in state-level anti-LGTBQ laws,” Rummler said during a webinar hosted by Public Religion Research Institute. “A lot of these are focused on transgender youth. Can they use the bathrooms in schools? Can kids in schools learn about LGTBQ issues? Can trans kids play in sports that match their gender?”
The 6-3 ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti is expected to have implications across the nation as 24 other states already have passed measures like Tennessee’s prohibition on hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors.
Orion Rummler
“And then these state laws have evolved over time to become broader and more extreme, although a lot of them have not gone into law because state advocates have very aggressively fought them, including in states like Texas and Florida especially,” Rummler explained.
A common thread in the laws is an attempt to legislate conservative ideas about gender, sex and reproduction, Rummler added. “And now we’re under the second Trump administration and we see the administration using a lot of this language in the executive orders focused on trans people, including the order that kind of vaguely says, in the administration’s view there’s only men and women in terms of gender and sex.”
PRRI hosted Rummler and other experts to flesh out the findings of its 2024 polling on the state of LGBTQ rights across the nation.
The survey of 22,000 adults found strong and steady support for same-sex marriage but more division on laws banning gender-affirming care for youth.
Melissa Deckman
“This is a very different political situation than even a decade ago when state legislatures politically were poised to change their policies with respect to requiring individuals to use the bathroom of the gender or sex that they were assigned at birth,” said PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman.
And the data give mixed signals in some instances, she added. “When we come to transgender rights more broadly, there’s large support, but when we come to some specific policies, we see more variants of public opinion.”
PRRI found Americans disagree about laws banning gender-affirming care for minors but are more likely to agree with measures requiring driver’s licenses to show sex at birth rather than chosen gender identity.
“The American public is more divided when it comes to these sorts of issues here. And we have seen over the last three years a small but somewhat perceptible decrease in opposition to these laws even among Democrats,” Deckman said.
Among all adults, 49% oppose bans on transgender care for minors while 47% favor them. Most Democrats (70%) oppose such laws compared to 30% of Republicans.
About four in 10 Americans oppose legislation requiring driver’s licenses to show the gender assigned at birth rather than the person’s stated gender identity, but the share is 60% for Democrats and 14% among Republicans.
Same-sex marriage
The study found support for same-sex marriage remains high in the general population but more polarized by partisanship.
The gulf between Democrats and Republicans has noticeably widened since Obergfell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex unions, Deckman explained.
“A decade ago, you had about a 30-point percentage partisan split between Republicans and Democrats with respect to support for same-sex marriage. Now it’s about 33% in terms of that split.”
But approval of same-sex marriage has increased among members of both parties since 2014, Deckman added. Democratic support stood at 83% in the most recent study, compared to 64% in 2014. Among Republicans, 35% favored same-sex marriage before the Obergfell ruling, compared to 54% by December 2024.
For all Americans, support for same-sex unions has flattened at 67% the past two years but remains well above the 54% measured just before the landmark Supreme Court ruling.
During that 10-year span, majorities in most religious groups supported same-sex marriage with the exception of Hispanic Protestants (from 35% in 2014 to 41% last year) and white evangelical Protestants (28% to 38%). Muslim support fell from 42% a decade ago to 33% last year.
Nondiscrimination laws
PRRI also asked respondents about their attitudes toward nondiscrimination laws designed to protect LGBTQ people in housing and employment.
“We find really high levels of support among the American public — three-quarters of Americans say that there should be discrimination laws that protect LGBTQ,” Deckman said. That represents an increase of four percentage points since the question was initially asked in 2015, but also a 5% decline from the high of 80% in 2022.
Divisions between Democrats (89%) and Republicans (62%) on the question were predictably wide but not as stark as they could be, Deckman said. “Even here a solid majority of Republicans support nondiscrimination protections.”
Most U.S. adults said they also oppose religiously based service refusals, such as when a business will not serve LGBTQ customers.
“Most Americans (58%) oppose ‘allowing a small business owner in your state to refuse to provide products or services to gay or lesbian people if doing so would violate their religious beliefs,’ compared with 38% in favor. This percentage has remained consistent since this question was first asked in 2015 (59%),” PRRI reported.
Increasing challenges
Kelsy Burke
When the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution last month calling for Obergefell to be overturned, that illustrated a growing trend in some quarters against inclusion.
PRRI’s found the number of Republican- and white evangelical-led groups arrayed against same-sex marriage has increased significantly since the Obergfell ruling, said Kelsy Burke, a sociology professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
“It can appear from public opinion data that the anti-LGBTQ movement has sort of bounced from one issue to the next, that we’ve moved away from marriage equality to attacks on trans people.”
But it won’t be long before it bounces back at same sex marriage, Rummler added.
“We see new challenges to that with respect to certain red-state legislatures, in fact, passing laws that are calling on the Supreme Court to reverse Obergfell.”
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