Republicans are mostly united in their views on LGBTQ+ rights. Democrats are not. 

Late last month, the Eleventh Circuit court of appeals heard oral arguments for a lawsuit filed on behalf of LGBTQ+ teachers in Florida over a new education policy that prohibits teachers from using pronouns or titles that do not correspond with the sex assigned to them at birth. 

Although Florida often dominates the headlines when it comes to battles over education and LGBTQ+ rights, these kinds of lawsuits are cropping up across the country. Earlier this month, a district court awarded a Virginia teacher nearly $600,000 after he sued his former employer, who fired him when citing his religious faith, he refused to use the correct pronouns for a transgender student. Last spring, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the firing of a gay teacher at a private Catholic high school in North Carolina after that teacher married his long-time partner. 

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Another Democrat bends on trans rights in new ad responding to GOP attacks

“If Democrats begin to compromise on transgender rights… the damage could be irreversible,” one advocate warned.

Not surprisingly, political affiliation affects how the public reacts to these kinds of lawsuits. In a recent national survey we conducted with the assistance of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), participants were randomly assigned to read a story either about a transgender teacher being fired from a religious school for coming out as transgender or about a religious teacher being fired from a private secular school for refusing to use the pronouns of a transgender student. 

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Only 23 percent of Republicans thought that the private secular school should have the legal right to fire the religious teacher. The vast majority (91 percent) thought doing so was morally wrong. Yet, 77 percent said it was lawful to fire the transgender teacher from a religious school. Republicans, in other words, had strong and relatively uniform reactions to these two scenarios.

Democrats were much more likely to support the rights of the transgender teacher and to oppose the rights of the religious teacher. But whereas nine out of ten Republicans took a supportive view of the religious teacher, only two-thirds of Democrats expressed support for the transgender teacher. 

One-third of the Democrats who read about the religious teacher at a secular school opposed the teacher’s firing. About the same number (34 percent) of the Democrats who read about the transgender teacher at a religious school supported firing that teacher. Among Independents, there was an even greater divide, with an almost even split in their views on the religious and transgender teachers.

The GOP has prioritized a concentrated attack on transgender personhood and rights, and public opinion polls suggest that its base tows the party line. Much of the party’s anti-trans attacks have focused on public schools, which Republicans have blamed for “grooming” children and violating conservative parents’ rights to dictate their child’s gender expression. 

In contrast, Democrats, who purportedly seek to defend transgender people amidst widespread conservative attacks are, in fact, far less ideologically coherent. Democrats are more heterogeneous when it comes to their attitudes, appearing more receptive to the conservative idea that transgender rights have gone “too far.”

Political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins call this asymmetric polarization. Republicans tend to be a coalition unified by a particular ideology, one which is both anti-public school and anti-LGBTQ+ rights, whereas Democrats tend to be a coalition of numerous group-based identities. It may thus be easier to mobilize Republicans around specific attitudes on religion and LGBTQ+ people than it is to mobilize Democrats around these same issues. 

This reality makes the fight for LGBTQ+ students’ and teachers’ rights all the more challenging. While the Biden administration did publish new guidelines in Title IX to incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity protections, twenty-two Republican-led states have sued to halt them from taking effect. And for two decades now, the Supreme Court has made it increasingly easy for private religious schools to both absorb public education funding and to lawfully discriminate against their workforce. With Florida and other states expanding school voucher programs where public money can support private (and often religious) schools and Oklahoma mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, battles over education, religion, and LGBTQ+ rights are likely to intensify. 

This election season, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposal to privatize education may further exacerbate conflicts around religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights. With Democrats holding more sympathy for religious teachers’ objections to respecting students’ pronouns than Republicans do for transgender teachers, LGBTQ+ advocates have an uphill battle when it comes to education and religion. 

In fact, there is evidence that all Americans — not just Republicans — are becoming more opposed to various measures of transgender rights and more supportive of religious refusals to serve or accommodate LGBTQ+ people. LGBTQ+ rights reveal fractures within the Democratic party. But LGBTQ+ people are more than polling metrics, and the GOP’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda affects more than queer people. Democrats must reckon with this reality in order to defend both LGBTQ+ rights and the social institutions like education that are core to our democracy.  

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