Americans still largely back transgender military service members, but share is falling
A dwindling majority of Americans say openly transgender men and women should be able to serve in the U.S. military despite the Trump administration’s reinstatement of a ban on transgender service members.
Nearly 6 in 10 Americans support transgender service members, according to Gallup poll results released this week. But the 58% figure reflects a gradual decline since 2019, when 71% of Americans were in favor. In 2021, the figure was 66%.
The steady decrease has prompted worries among some in the transgender community, who blame it on what they call a deliberate campaign of misinformation and rhetoric from Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump.
“I am concerned but not surprised,” said Alaina Kupec, president and founder of the transgender advocacy group Gender Research Advisory Council + Education, or GRACE. “The unrelenting attacks on the community by Republican lawmakers across the country have led to this erosion.”
Indeed, the latest decrease was driven mostly by Republicans, just 23% of whom support transgender military service, down from 43% in both 2019 and 2021. Meanwhile, slightly more than 6 in 10 independents said they backed transgender military service in the latest poll, down from 66% in 2021 and 78% in 2019.
Trump made gender identity issues a focus of his campaign, with transgender rights a favorite target of his TV ads and rallies despite the community representing barely 1% of the population, prompting fears that eliminating those rights would be among his initial priorities.
Such fears are now proving warranted. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order declaring the federal government would recognize only two sexes, male and female; more recently, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to suspend medical treatment for transgender troops and restrict transgender recruits from enlisting.
“They’re endangering people in the military who are willing to put their lives on the line to serve the United States of America,” Tanya Walker, a transgender Army veteran in New York City, told Paste BN.
A small community vulnerable to misperceptions
An estimated 10,000 to 14,000 of the nation’s nearly 2 million active-duty and reserves are transgender − less than 1% − and about 1,000 of them require treatment. A study commissioned by the Pentagon found allowing transgender people to serve results in minimal costs or effects on troops’ readiness.
Kupec, who started GRACE out of exasperation over the effect such rhetoric was having on public perception, said the community is so small that few people personally know someone who is transgender, which makes them susceptible to misinformation.
“Their perception is largely driven by what they hear and are told instead of what they know through their own experience,” she said.
Trump’s executive orders, she said, have parroted policies laid out in Project 2025, a conservative playbook published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023, continuing a series of attacks on transgender rights that began with sports bans and restrictions on gender-affirming care for young people.
At the same time, Kupec said, the community itself is partly to blame for being so unbending, embracing an “all-or-nothing approach” in the fight for transgender protections.
“There has been no willingness to compromise on any transgender issues, and this purity test ignores the reality that most of the public don’t know someone in our community and are going to look at issues through how it resonates with them.”
Such obstinance is detrimental when complex realities are overtaken by public perception, she said – for instance, when it comes to presumed advantages of transgender women in sports.
“The community has lost credibility because it expects the public to accept us all carte blanche with no nuance, even when it doesn’t align with common sense,” Kupec said.
Americans largely support women in combat roles
The Gallup telephone poll of 1,001 adults in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia was done Jan. 21-27.
The poll also found that most Americans support women serving in combat roles in the armed services, a policy Hegseth had opposed before his nomination. Nearly 8 in 10 U.S. adults say women should be allowed to serve in military combat roles, including 94% of Democrats, 80% of independents and 60% of Republicans.
Walker, 61, said the public has been misled by campaign misinformation about the transgender population.
“They bombarded the airwaves with misinformation about transgender people,” she said, calling for advocates to align with medical voices to “flood the airwaves with the truth.”
Organizations like GRACE, Kupec said, hope to counter what she said is a “false narrative being spread by Christian extremists who seek only to divide our nation.”
“Members of the transgender community want nothing more than to live our lives quietly and invisibly, side by side within our communities,” Kupec said. “We should not be marginalized for political opportunism. We never asked for this fight, nor do we want it.”
Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook and Bart Jansen