Transgender Issues are a Strength for Trump, AP-NORC Poll Finds
WASHINGTON (AP) — About half of U.S. adults approve of how President Donald Trump is handling transgender issues, according to a new poll — a relative high point for a president who has the approval overall of about 4 in 10 Americans.
But support for his individual policies on transgender people is not uniformly strong, with a clearer consensus against policies that affect youth.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research[1] survey conducted this month found there's more support than opposition on allowing transgender troops in the military, while most don’t want to allow transgender students to use the public school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and oppose using government programs to pay for gender-affirming health care for transgender youth.
Schuyler Fricchione, a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother from northern Virginia, is one of those who opposes the government paying for gender-affirming care, especially for young people.
She said she doesn’t want people to make major changes that they might later regret. But she said that because of her Catholic faith, she doesn't want to exclude transgender people from public life. “It's very important to me that everyone understands their dignity and importance as a person.”
“It is something I am kind of working through myself,” she said. “I am still learning.”
Most adults agree with Trump that sex is determined at birth
About two-thirds of U.S. adults agree with President Donald Trump that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by their biological characteristics at birth.
The poll found that Republicans overwhelmingly believe gender identity is defined by sex at birth, but Democrats are divided, with about half saying gender identity can differ from biological characteristics at birth. The view that gender identity can't be separated from sex at birth view contradicts what the American Medical Association and other mainstream medical groups say[2]: that extensive scientific research suggests sex and gender are better understood as a spectrum than as an either-or definition.
A push against the recognition and rights of transgender people[3], who make up about 1% of the nation's population, has been a major part of Trump's return to the White House — and was a big part of his campaign[4].
He has signed executive orders calling for the government to classify people by unchangeable sex rather than gender[5], oust transgender service members and kick transgender women and girls out of sports competitions[6] for females. Those actions and others are being challenged in court, and judges have put many of his efforts on hold.
The public is divided on some issues — and many are neutral
Despite being a hot-button issue overall, a big portion of the population is neutral or undecided on several key policies.
About 4 in 10 people supported requiring public schoolteachers to report to parents if their children are identifying at school as transgender or nonbinary. About 3 in 10 opposed it and a similar number was neutral.
About the same portion of people — just under 4 in 10 — favored allowing transgender troops in the military as were neutral about it. About one-quarter opposed it.
Tim Phares, 59, a registered Democrat in Kansas who says he most often votes for Republicans, is among those in the middle on that issue.
One on hand, he said, “Either you can do the job or you can't do the job.” But on the other, he added, “I'm not a military person, so I'm not qualified to judge how it affects military readiness.”
This month, a divided U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump's administration to enforce a ban[7] on transgender people in the military while legal challenges proceed, a reversal of what lower courts have said.
Most object to government coverage of gender-affirming care for youth
About half oppose allowing government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender-affirming medical care, such as hormone therapy and surgery, for transgender people 19 or older. About two-thirds oppose it for those under 19.
And on each of those questions, a roughly equal portion of the populations support the coverage or is neutral about it.
One of Trump's executive orders keeps federal insurance plans from paying for gender-affirming care for those under 19. A court has ruled that funding can't be dropped[8] from institutions that provide the care, at least for now.
Meanwhile, Trump's administration this month released a report calling for therapy alone[9] and not broader gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. Twenty-seven states have bans on the care for minors, and the Supreme Court[10] is expected to rule in coming months over whether the bans can hold.
Forming a stance is easy for some
While Democrats are divided on many policies related to transgender issues, they're more supportive than the population overall. There is no anguish over the issue or other transgender policy questions for Isabel Skinner, a 32-year-old politics professor in Illinois.
She has liberal views on transgender people, shaped partly by her being a member of the LGBTQ+ community as a bisexual and pansexual person, and also by knowing transgender people.
She was in the minority who supported allowing transgender students to use the public-school bathrooms that match their gender identity — something that at least 14 states have passed laws[11] to ban in the last five years.
“I don’t understand where the fear comes from,” Skinner said, “because there really doesn’t seem to be any basis of reality for the fear of transgender people.”
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Mulvihill reported from New Jersey.
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,175 adults was conducted May 1-5, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
© Copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Hegseth Orders End to Race Consideration in Admissions at Military Service Academies
Military.com | By Konstantin Toropin[1]
Published
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered all military service academies to no longer consider race, ethnicity or sex for admissions, according to a memo released Friday.
The move appears to not only effectively end affirmative action efforts at the three military service academies, which were spared from a Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions two years ago, but goes even further by including ethnicity and sex.
Hegseth's memo goes on to say that admission to the academies will be based "exclusively on merit," because "selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our armed forces[2]."
Read Next: About 1,000 Troops Slated for Immediate Separation Under Reinstated Transgender Ban[3]
It is not clear why Hegseth felt the need to issue the directive now.
In March, the Naval Academy[4] told a federal court it was not considering race, ethnicity or sex as a factor for admission because of President Donald Trump's Jan. 27 executive order that said "every element of the armed forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex."
It is also not clear how this directive would work with the service academy requirement for a congressional or presidential nomination, which have their own criteria.
When asked both questions, a defense official told Military.com[5] that Hegseth's office didn't have anything additional to add.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said "policies like this enable the department to develop a strong officer corps, foster a culture of excellence, and achieve the mission, now and in the future” in a statement released Friday[6].
While Hegseth and Trump have been aggressive in targeting any diversity or affirmative action efforts inside the military, the courts have repeatedly found that the military and its academies have unique interests when it comes to its admissions.
When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote his majority opinion striking down the ability to use race in university admissions in 2023, he noted the Army[7]'s Military Academy at West Point[8], the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy[9] may have "potentially distinct interests" when it comes to admissions and that diversity in the armed forces may be a national security issue.
In December, another judge again ruled[10] the Naval Academy could continue to consider race in its admissions, finding "the academy has tied its use of race to the realization of an officer corps that represents the country it protects and the people it leads."
"The academy has proven that this national security interest is indeed measurable and that its admissions program is narrowly tailored to meet that interest," the judge wrote in an opinion.
Parnell said the three academies have 30 days to "confirm that admission will be based exclusively on merit for the 2026 admissions cycle and beyond."
Pentagon Committee Created to Direct Book Banning in Service Branches
The Pentagon dramatically expanded efforts to censor and remove books with topics such as diversity and anti-racism by ordering all military branches to scrub libraries of "divisive concepts and gender ideology" and pull those materials from shelves, according to a memo issued Friday[1].
The memo, signed by the acting deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, directs all military educational institutions, specifically noting war colleges and the service academies, to "promptly" identify books on about 20 topics and set them aside by May 21.
The memo also announces the creation of a temporary Academic Libraries Committee "consisting of knowledgeable leaders, educators, and library professionals" from across the Defense Department who will work to help identify books for censorship and then help decide their ultimate fate.
Read Next: About 1,000 Troops Slated for Immediate Separation Under Reinstated Transgender Ban[2]
The expanded effort on books at military libraries comes after the Naval Academy[3] was specifically ordered to go through its book collection last month and the Navy released a list of nearly 400 books[4] that were removed from circulation[5].
The list included titles by prominent Black authors such as Maya Angelou as well as Black politicians like Bakari Sellers and Stacey Abrams. The list also included a book on female Jewish experiences in the Holocaust and a midshipman's research thesis.
In April, The New York Times reported[6] the academy still had two copies of Adolf Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf, on its shelves.
An Army[7] official told Military.com last month the Army's military academy at West Point[8], N.Y., also compiled a list of books that it felt ran afoul of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's orders to strip materials related to diversity and submitted it to the Pentagon. However, unlike the Navy, the Army did not make that list public.
West Point declined to comment on its methodology of how it selected its books, or who was in charge of those decisions.
On Thursday, a tenured professor of philosophy at West Point said the storied military academy was interpreting Hegseth's order "broadly" and conducting "a sweeping assault on the school's curriculum and the faculty members' research" in an op-ed for The New York Times[9].
The professor, Graham Parsons, said he was resigning from his post because the school was "suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration."
The new memo appears to try to impose some rigor to the Pentagon's censorship efforts that, to date, have featured vague orders from Hegseth to remove all "news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), including content related to critical race theory, gender ideology, and identity-based programs."
The result was the removal of books that highlighted women who fought in the U.S. Civil War[10]; deleted websites that featured Kristen Griest[11], the first woman to graduate from the Army's famously grueling Ranger School; and lessons in Air Force[12] boot camp that featured the Tuskegee Airmen, the historic Black aviators, and the Women's Airforce Service Pilots.
The removals prompted outrage after becoming public, and some of the content has been restored[13]. However, Hegseth's office has not offered a full accounting of what has been removed to date.
Contained within the memo is a list of standardized topics used by the Library of Congress to direct military officials in their efforts. The list contains such terms as affirmative action, anti-racism, white privilege and discrimination, as well as a host of topics around gender dysphoria and transgender people, including transgender people in the military.
Hegseth and the Pentagon announced they will push forward with a ban on transgender troops[14], saying they are unfit for service, following a Supreme Court decision to lift a lower court's temporary injunction.
After all the books are identified and removed from access by troops, the memo says the library committee will then decide what to do with the material by no later than June.
-- Steve Beynon contributed to this report.
Related: Naval Academy Staff Removed Display on Female Jewish Graduates for Hegseth Visit[15]
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