The Culture Wars: Gender Transition Surgery and ‘Don't Say Gay’
A demonstrator holds a pride flag in front of the U.S. Supreme Court during Obergefell v. Hodges arguments. (Photo by Ted Eytan)
(ANALYSIS) I’ve been listening to a fascinating audiobook on my drives the last couple of weeks — “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion” by Edward Larson. It’s a tremendous look at the debate over biblical interpretation and political discourse at a critical juncture in American religious history.
Here’s a fun little fact about Dayton, Tenn., where the Scopes trial was held. According to Larson, “a relatively high percentage of Dayton residents did not belong to any denomination; indeed, the town’s Masonic lodge claimed more adult male members than any local church.”
The impression that you get from Larson is that a lots of folks in town were culturally conservative, even though they weren’t well versed in the tenets of biblical literalism or bothered to show up at church on an average Sunday.
That got me thinking — I believe that we can probably find an example of the culture war in nearly every era of American history. Once the furor around creationism waned and we moved past the worst parts of the Cold War, Americans started debating the permissiveness of pornography and the value of obscenity. That, of course, gave way to what I would call the modern iteration of the culture war debate. What began as a discussion about abortion in the mid 1970s lead to a concerted effort to push back on homosexuality in the last several decades.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell, the debate over same-sex marriage has largely ended in the United States — the Respect for Marriage Act, which was passed 2022, went a long way to ensure that SCOTUS would not reverse its prior decision. But the debate has now evolved beyond sexual orientation to gender identity. Consider this: The first “bathroom bill” passed in the United States was in North Carolina in 2016. Obergefell was decided less than a year earlier.
I haven’t dabbled in too much polling data that centers around issues related to a transgender identity — largely because I don’t have access to polls that include questions on the topic. But the 2023 Cooperative Election Study did ask a three-question battery that I thought was worth some exploration. Here are the top line results:
According to this one poll, about two-thirds of Americans believe that it should be a crime for a health care worker to aid a minor child in obtaining gender transition surgery. An even larger share (71%), seem to support the idea of Florida's ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill that created guidelines for what topics teachers could address in the classroom that related to gender identity and sexual orientation.
But then the last question seems to point in a different direction. Fifty-eight percent of respondents agreed that local government should be prohibited from interfering with a person’s ability to obtain a gender transition operation.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.