What Americans were actually asked about transgender people

A structured archive of public-opinion polling on transgender people and trans-related policy, fielded 2014–2026. Every figure here is transcribed from a public source and links back to the pollster’s own release. Every question is stored with its verbatim wording, because on this subject the wording is most of the answer.

Read this first. There is no single number for “public opinion on transgender issues.” In one ten-week stretch of 2025, three national polls on the same policy returned 33%, 56% and 71% support for restriction — the difference was how the question was written. This archive exists to make that visible rather than to average it away. See Wording.

Start here

Explore every poll →

Filter 646 polls by topic, pollster, year, geography and sampling method. Each question shows its full wording, its toplines, and a link to the original release.

Trends over time →

91 question series asked three or more times by the same pollster — the only comparisons in this archive that are safe to plot as a trend line.

How wording changes the answer →

The same policy, the same year, different questions. Side-by-side comparisons showing spreads of 30–40 points with no change in opinion underneath.

Who asked →

132 polling organizations, with sampling method, mode and sponsor. Includes advocacy-commissioned polls, labeled as such.

What the archive shows

Rights held; recognition did not

Support for nondiscrimination protections barely moved in eleven years — PRRI recorded 71% in 2015 and 72% in 2025, peaking at 80% in 2022. Over the same period, the share saying a person’s sex is determined at birth rose from 54% to 67% (Pew, adults).

Two measures, opposite directions. Describing opinion as uniformly hardening — or uniformly stable — reads one half of the data.

Salience is low

Where pollsters asked people to rank priorities, transgender issues came near the bottom: 2% named the debate a most-important issue (Public First, 2022); 3% ranked laws on gay and transgender issues a priority against 48% for inflation (Impact Research).

Strong opinions, weakly held as a voting priority.

How to read the numbers here

Verified vs. lead. A poll marked verified had its figures read from a retrieved primary source. An unverified lead records that a poll exists and where to look — its numbers should not be cited. Leads are hidden by default; there is a toggle on the Explore page.

Paraphrased wording. Where a pollster published no topline, the question text is a reconstruction from a write-up and is flagged paraphrased wording. Do not quote those as the pollster’s words.

Surveys of transgender people are not opinion polls. Records flagged as such (the U.S. Transgender Survey, Trevor Project, Washington Post/KFF) are mostly nonprobability community samples describing a population. They are never comparable with polls of the public.

Polls by year fielded

The same numbers as a table

Year fielded	Polls
2014	7
2015	31
2016	46
2017	29
2018	24
2019	20
2020	16
2021	52
2022	80
2023	96
2024	91
2025	108
2026	44

The 2016–2017 rise is the bathroom-bill period; the climb from 2021 reflects real growth in polling volume. Earlier years are also thinner because releases from 2014–2017 have had longer to disappear from the web. 2026 is partial.

Built from a research archive of public polling. Figures are transcribed from public sources and link to the original release; this site is not affiliated with any polling organization. Archive last built September 24, 2026.