TRANSGENDER RIGHTS AND POLICY RESPONSIVENESS: The impact of public opinion on the adoption of transgender policy in the United States

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the American population's general perception of the transgender community has improved significantly. With this shift, transgender people were expected to be granted greater access to legal rights at the federal and state levels. However, from the mid2010s onwards, when trans policy began to be heavily debated, policy implemented moved against the perceived interests of trans people in some states. As a result, questions arose regarding whether there is responsiveness to public opinion for the implementation of policies aimed at the transgender community, given the existence of a theoretical basis for the occurrence of such dynamic. Due to the lack of policy-specific public opinion surveys at the state level, empirical evidence of responsiveness is scarce. To solve this problem, this study used a novel approach to measure public opinion on transgender rights. By estimating statelevel feeling thermometers for the trans and gay population and policy-specific public opinion for bathroom bills through multilevel regression with post-stratification, it was possible to identify a slow process of increasing responsiveness to transgender policies in the states, whether through the adoption of inclusive or discriminatory policies. This responsiveness does not occur for all policies or comply with the opinion of a simple majority, but it does suggest that there is a tendency towards greater congruence between public opinion and policy implementation in the future.