Transgender people are about 1% of the American population. Yet they are a political lightning

On the countryside track, Donald Trump Used litigation on the access of transgender people to sports and bathrooms to activate conservative voters and influence the undecided. And in his first months in office, Trump further pushed the matter, canceling the mention of transgender people on websites and government passports and trying to remove them from the military.

It is a contradiction of the numbers that reveals a profound cultural division: Transgender People represent less than 1% of the US population, but have become an important piece in the political chessboard, in particular that of Trump.

For transgender people and their allies – together with several judges who have decided against Trump in response to legal challenges – it is a matter of civil rights for a small group. But many Americans believe that those rights have become too expansive.

The president’s spotlight is giving transgender day of visibility on Monday a different tenor this year.

“What she wants is to scare us again invisible,” said Rachel Crandall Crocker, executive director of the Transgender Michigan who organized the first day of visibility 16 years ago. “We have to show him that we will not go back.”

So why did this small population find itself with such an out of measurement in American politics?

Attention to transgender people is part of a longtime campaign

Trump’s actions reflect a constellation of beliefs that transgender people are dangerous, they are men who try to access the spaces of women or are pushed into the gender changes they will regret later.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and other important medical groups have said that gender affirmation treatments may be necessary from a medical point of view and are supported by tests.

Zein Murib, associate professor of political science and studies on women, of gender and sexuality at Fordham UniversityHe said that there was a ten -year effort “to restore Christian nationalist principles as the law of the earth” which has increased his attention to transgender people after a sentence of the 2015 United States Supreme Court that recognizes the marriage between people of the same sex at national level. It took a few years, but some of the positions have gained traction.

A factor: the supporters of the restrictions rely on larger issues of fairness and security, which attract more public attention.

Sports prohibitions and bathroom laws are linked to the protection of spaces for women and girls, even if studies have discovered that transgender women are more likely to be victims of violence. The efforts to prevent schools from encouraging gender transition are connected to the protection of parents’ rights. And the prohibitions on the care that affirm the genre are based in part on the idea that people could later repent, although studies discovered it rare.

Since 2020, about half of the states has approved laws who exclude transgender people from sports competitions that align with their kind and have banned or limited medical assistance that affirms the genre for minors. At least 14 have adopted laws by limiting which bathrooms transgender people can use in certain buildings.

In February, Iowa became the first state to remove the protections for transgender people from civil rights law.

It is not just the political game. “I think that if this is a politically practicable strategy it is second to the immediate impact it will have on trans people,” Murib of Fordham said.

Many voters think that transgender rights have gone too far

More than half of the voters in the 2024 – 55% elections – he said that the support for transgender rights in the United States went too far, according to AP Votecast. About 2 out of 10 said that the support level was right and a similar share stated that the support did not go far enough.

However, AP Votecast also discovered that the voters have been divided into laws that prohibit medical treatment that affirms the genre, as blocking of puberty or hormonal therapy, for minors. Just over half he opposed these laws, while just under half he was in favor.

Trump’s voters had an overwhelming probability to say that the support for transgender rights went too far, while Kamala Harris’s voters were more divided. About 4 out of 10 voters in Harris said that the support for transgender rights did not go far enough, while 36% said it was right and about a quarter said it went too far.

A survey this year of the Pew Research Center has discovered that the Americans, including the Democrats, have become more slightly more favorable to requesting the transgender athletes to compete in teams that correspond to their sex at birth and more in favor of the prohibitions on medical care that affirm the genre for the minor transgender since 2022. Most of the Democrats still oppose those types of measures.

Leor Sapir, a member of the Manhattan Institute, a right -wing Think Tank, says Trump and Trump Republicans‘The positions have given them a political advantage.

“They are putting their opponents, their democratic opponents, in a very unfavorable position, having to decide between their basis of progressive activists or their median voter,” he said.

Not everyone agrees.

“People throughout the political spectrum agree that in fact the main crises and the main problems that the United States face at this moment are not the existence and civic participation of trans people,” said Olivia Hunt, director of federal policy for lawyers for trans equality.

And in the same elections that saw Trump return to the presidency, the Delaware voters elected Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of the congress.

The complete political relapse remains to be seen

Paisley Currah, professor of political science at City University in New York, said that conservatives follow transgender people in part because they constitute such a small part of the population.

“Because it is so small, it is relatively unknown,” said Currah, that it is transgender. “And then Trump used trans to indicate what’s wrong with the left. You know:” It’s too crazy. It is too awakened. “”

But democratic politicians also know that the population is relatively small, said Seth Masket, director of the Centers On American Politics of the University of Denver, who is writing a book on the Gop.

“Many democrats are not particularly lit to defend this group,” Masket said, citing the polls.

For republicans, the overall support of transgender rights is proof that I am in step with the times.

“The Democratic Party continues to be on the wrong side of extraordinarily popular issues and demonstrates how outside the world they are with the Americans,” said the spokesman for the National Republican Congress Committee Mike Marinella.

Part of that message could pass. At the beginning of March, California Gov. Gavin NewsomA potential candidate for the Democratic Presidency of 2028, launched his new podcast speaking against allowing transgender women and girls competing in women’s and female sport.

And many other democratic officials have said that the party spends too many efforts to support transgender rights. Others, including the American senator Catherine Cortez Masto, said they oppose the transgender athletes in women and female sports.

Jay Jones, president of the student government of Howard University and a transgender woman, said that her peers largely accept transgender people.

“The Trump administration is trying to arm the people of the trans experience … to help give an armigue or a scapegoat,” he said. But “I don’t think it will be as successful as the strategy as he thinks it will be.”

___

Associated Press Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has contributed to this article. Jesse Bedayn is a member of the body for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a non -profit national service program that places journalists in local editorial offices to be reported on non -covered issues.