Education is an important factor for many Virginia voters this fall, but transgender issues, one of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s most controversial education cornerstones, is a low priority for voters, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.
“I’m not seeing in the data that the trans issue and how that is playing in public schools is a big driver right now in the electorate,” said Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
Youngkin’s model policies for the treatment of transgender students in public schools have been among his most controversial education moves since he took office in 2022. The guidance, implemented in July, replaced a 2021 version from then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D) that offered protections for transgender students.
Youngkin’s policies direct students to use school facilities that match their biological sex and make it harder for them to change their name or pronouns at school. School districts in Virginia are required to adopt their own rules in accordance with the state guidance, but a few districts have rejected the governor’s proposal.
According to the Post-Schar School poll, 39 percent of Virginia voters say that public schools are “doing too much to accommodate trans students,” while 25 percent say schools are handling things about right and 21 percent say they are not doing enough. Another 15 percent have no opinion. Opinions among public school parents are very similar.
Despite support for some of Virginia’s recommended policies, more voters disapprove of Youngkin’s handling of transgender issues than approve, 43 percent to 37 percent. And asked which party they trust more to handle transgender issues, 50 percent choose Democrats while 33 percent choose Republicans.
School policies affecting trans students are relatively new, with public opinion still taking shape. The Post-Schar School poll used a randomized question wording experiment to see how much support for policies varied when framed as providing permission for trans students to do various things vs. placing restrictions on their actions. Half of respondents received questions about “requiring” or “preventing” policies on certain issues, while the other half received questions about “allowing” other things.
In 3 out of 4 cases, more voters opposed allowing trans students to do various things than supported specific restrictions. For example, 70 percent of voters say they’re against “allowing trans girls to compete in sports against other girls,” far more than the 45 percent who support “preventing trans girls from competing in sports with other girls.”
That pattern is similar for notifying parents if a child goes by different names or genders at school. Seventy-two percent oppose allowing children to do so without their parents’ knowledge. But sentiment is less strong, with 63 percent support, for requiring schools to notify parents. (In both cases, though, a clear majority says parents should be notified.)
Voters are closely divided on whether teachers may refer to students based on their gender identity, regardless of their birth-certificate sex.
The findings suggest views on trans issues are malleable. Some voters interviewed by The Post said that issues related to transgender students in schools were often nuanced and needed to be left up to individual schools or parents, not sweeping legislation or restrictions. Kim Denys, for example, said she generally opposes the idea of transgender girls playing on sports teams with other girls, but she also doesn’t want to see strict rules in place.
“Kids shouldn’t be excluded from participating in sports for that,” Denys, 39, said. “I think the policies on sports should be handled at the local level. I don’t think the state should be legislating this stuff.”
Youngkin’s model policies state that participation in athletic programs “shall be determined by sex rather than gender or gender identity” and that school divisions “shall provide reasonable modifications to this policy only to the extent required by law.” But the Virginia High School League, which oversees school sports in the state, still lets transgender student-athletes participate on sports teams that match their gender identity after a multistep appeal process. Only 25 students have filed an application since the appeal process was established in 2014. Three applications have been denied, and the rest were approved. Ten of the 25 appeals were filed in the 2022-2023 school year.
Other voters, too, showed nuance in their views about transgender students. Rebecca Sweetser, who has a 10th-grader enrolled in Fairfax County Public Schools, said it seemed like parents are more concerned about these issues than students, who she said generally seem accepting. But she said she was interested in finding ways to accommodate all students — including those who may not want to share bathrooms — such as opening a third bathroom option.
“We’re talking about making a handful of people comfortable at risk of making more people feel uncomfortable,” Sweetser, 58, said. “There’s too much emphasis on this coming from the government. Every time you do something sweepy across the board, a lot of people get screwed.”
The Post-Schar School poll finds that 54 percent of Virginia voters personally know someone who is transgender; this group is more likely to oppose some restrictive policies but not others. Forty-two percent of voters who know a trans person oppose requiring that trans students use bathrooms that correspond to their birth sex, compared with 29 percent of those who don’t know a trans person. Fifty-five percent of those who know a trans person oppose requiring teachers to refer to students as their birth sex over the students’ objections, compared with 40 percent of voters who don’t know a trans person.
But 44 percent of both groups of voters oppose rules against trans girls playing sports with other girls. And at least 6 in 10 voters who know a trans person (61 percent) and don’t know a trans person (67 percent) support requiring schools to notify parents if their child asks to go by a different name or gender.
Ian Brown, 33, the father of a second-grader enrolled in Virginia Beach Public Schools, said he has known transgender people and respected their chosen names and pronouns, and teachers should generally do the same and find compromises in situations where people don’t feel comfortable. Ultimately, Brown said, he’s thinking about education as a voter, but not about transgender issues.
“We’re spending way too much time and energy on this,” Brown said. “I would rather them do virtually anything else.”
Parents agree on other education issues, such as pandemic-fueled learning loss. According to The Post-Schar School poll, 65 percent of parents with kids in schools say at least some of their children were losing ground academically during the covid-19 pandemic. About a quarter (27 percent) say they did not lose ground.
And parents who reported learning loss are split over whether these kids have made up for it; 49 percent say they’ve recovered “most” of their academic losses, while 45 percent say they’ve made up “some” or “less.”
Among all parents, 31 percent say their kids have now made up most of their lost ground, 29 percent say they’ve made up less than that, and 27 percent say they didn’t fall behind at all.
Last month, Youngkin announced steps to help improve academic performance as newly released test scores showed students are still struggling to recover in reading and math after pandemic school closures. The results showed that students had performed nearly the same on reading and math as they did the year before and remained significantly lower than before the pandemic.
About two-thirds of parents who send their kids to public or charter schools rate their local schools positively for making up for academic lost ground since the pandemic. But far more parents rate their schools “good” (47 percent) than “excellent” (17 percent). Just 7 percent say their schools have done a poor job at making up for lost ground; 23 percent say they have done a “not so good” job at it.
Rozell said the positive reviews from parents were striking because they go against a common narrative in the political sphere that public schools are failing.
“It may be heartening to many public educators who feel that they’ve been under attack by a particularly vocal group on the right to learn that most parents think that the public schools are behaving responsibly and seriously trying to deal with issues of learning loss and making sure that their children get a good education,” Rozell said. “I think it’s a good story to tell about public education.”
The poll was conducted by The Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, Oct. 11-16, among a random sample of 1,181 registered voters in Virginia drawn from a statewide voter database. Live caller interviewers reached respondents on cellphones and landlines; other respondents were reached via text message and invited to take the survey online. The overall margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.