Voters trust Democrats over Republicans on transgender issues by 22 points, according to a Fox News poll released this week. That’s the largest partisan gap on any issue the poll tested—larger than healthcare, larger than vaccines, and larger than the Republican advantage on border security.
Fox released detailed demographic crosstabs showing how every voter subgroup feels about ICE enforcement, Greenland, and military intervention in Cuba. The transgender question’s crosstabs are “held for future release.”
The numbers
The poll, conducted January 23-26 by Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R), surveyed 1,005 registered voters. Democrats hold advantages on transgender issues (+22), healthcare (+21), vaccines (+16), helping the middle class (+14), and affordability (+14), while Republicans lead on border security (+15), national security (+12), and immigration (+5).
The generic congressional ballot shows Democrats leading 52-46, which Fox notes is the highest Democratic number the network has ever recorded on this question.
Fox has known this for a while
This isn’t the first time Fox’s polling has delivered this finding. In September 2024, weeks after the Trump campaign launched its “Kamala is for they/them” ad blitz, a Fox News poll found Harris leading Trump by 16 points on who voters trust to handle transgender issues. That advantage included a 10-point lead among men, 19 points among independents, and 21 points among voters over 65. The Trump campaign kept running the ads anyway.
Earlier this month, pollster Joey Teitelbaum of told an audience at the National Press Club that voters prefer Democratic positions on trans issues by a two-to-one margin. In every state her firm has polled, she said, no more than 18 percent of voters say being transgender should be illegal.
And in Virginia last November, Abigail Spanberger absorbed eight figures worth of anti-trans attack ads from her Republican opponent, went on offense during the debate by calling out GOP policies directly, and won the governorship.
What Fox won’t show you
The crosstabs Fox released are extensive. You can see that 65 percent of suburban women say ICE is being too aggressive, that 85 percent of independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of Greenland, and that 71 percent of voters under 30 say the country is worse off than a year ago. The data can be sliced by gender, race, age, education, party, ideology, geography, and 2024 vote.
On transgender issues—the single largest partisan gap in the entire survey—none of that is available. The topline document notes that questions 21 through 31 are “held for future release,” and the party trust question on trans issues falls in that range.
That means we can’t answer the questions that actually matter heading into the midterms: Have independents moved even further from the GOP on trans issues after a year of Trump’s executive orders? Are suburban women recoiling from the administration’s approach? Is this issue driving youth turnout? Fox has that data sitting in a file somewhere, and they’ve decided not to share it.
Fox News programming has spent years treating trans people as an existential threat worthy of near-constant coverage. Fox News polling keeps finding that voters don’t see it that way. The network knows its own strategy failed—they just don’t want to show you the details.
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Just the fact the won't show those numbers says a lot to anyone watching. Maybe they can hide numbers but the facts have a way of letting themselves be known.
https://thistleandmoss.com/p/the-daily-exhale-jesus-raymundo-walk-into-a-bar-then-the-shit-gets-real
"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative."
— Anaïs Nin
Growth isn't linear, and neither is survival. Some days you're advocating at city hall. Some days you're crying in your car before work. Some days you're doing both within the same hour. This is what it means to live through historical pressure—we expand where we can, contract where we must, and never apologize for the shape we take to stay whole. Be gentle with your asymmetry today. It's keeping you alive.