Americans are deeply divided over whether gender identity should be taught in school, according to two polls released this week that underscored the extent of the divide on one of the most controversial issues in education.
Many groups, including Democrats, teachers and teenagers, are divided over whether schools should teach about gender identity — a person’s internal sense of gender and whether it aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth , according to a survey by researchers at the University of Southern California and a separate survey by the Pew Research Center.
But on issues of race, another issue that fueled state restrictions and book bans, there was broader support for teaching. That extended to some Republicans, according to the USC survey.
The results underscore the nuances of opinion on two of the most divisive issues in public education, even as the American public remains deeply polarized along party lines.
The USC survey asked a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 adults, about half of whom lived with at least one school-age child, and elicited responses across party lines.
Democrats were largely supportive of LGBTQ-themed instruction in schools, but were divided on addressing transgender issues for younger students in elementary school.
Fewer than half of Democrats polled supported teaching about gender identity in elementary school or using pronouns for a transgender student at that age without asking parents. About a third of Democrats supported assigning a book about the personal experiences of a non-binary author to elementary students.
But for high school students, a strong majority of Democrats supported teaching these and other LGBTQ topics.
Republicans have strongly opposed teaching about transgender issues at all grade levels. They expressed more support, especially for older students, for teaching same-sex marriage issues, which became legal nationally in 2015. Nearly half of Republicans supported allowing a high school teacher to display a photo of a same-sex spouse on their desk, for example.
Republicans showed a similar pattern on race topics, with more support for teaching these topics to older students.
A majority of respondents—including a majority of Republicans—supported teaching the following topics in high school: slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War, discussing the ways some white Americans opposed the civil rights movement, and investigating causes of racial wealth gaps. There was less support among Republicans for teaching about more contemporary concepts, such as commissioning a book about the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager or discussing the use of race in college admissions.
The two issues — teaching race and history and addressing LGBTQ issues and gender identity in school — have often gone hand-in-hand in policy debates, with conservative lawmakers seeking to limit what schools and liberal politicians to defend and occasionally demand instructions. California, for example, will soon require students to take ethnic studies in high school.
However, the results are the latest to suggest that the American public may have more complex views on the issues, with views varying depending on the scenario and the age of the students involved.
State laws don’t always reflect the diversity of opinion even within a state’s majority party, in part because states are increasingly partisan, with fewer districts, said Eric Platcher, political science professor and director of polling at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. , who was not involved in the new investigations.
“We’re in a period where public opinion in general is probably less important than grassroots and early voter opinion” for both parties, he said. “That’s an important context to understand this.”
The Pew survey looked at the views of teachers and teenage students and found that they, too, are deeply divided about whether schools should teach about gender identity.
Half of teachers — including 62 percent of elementary school teachers — said gender identity should not be taught, according to the survey, which included about 2,500 K-12 teachers. Those who supported teaching about gender identity were more likely to teach older middle and high school students and to identify as Democrats.
(Overall, 58 percent of teachers identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party and 35 percent identified or leaned toward the Republican Party, according to Pew — a more liberal population than Americans overall, who are almost evenly split.)
Similarly, about half of the 1,400 teens surveyed by Pew said they didn’t think they should learn about gender identity in school. This view was more common among teens who identified as Republican or leaned Republican, but was also held by more than a third of teens who were more liberal.
About one in 10 teenagers surveyed said racism and racial inequality never came up in their classrooms. Slightly more – 14 percent – said the same about sexual orientation and gender identity.
