Poll: LGBTQ acceptance discussions ‘inappropriate’ for young students, Maryland voters say – The Washington Post
Over half, 54 percent of voters, say such discussions are appropriate for middle school, and 69 percent say they are appropriate in high school. A separate nationwide poll by the University of Southern California found a similar pattern, with about 6 in 10 Americans saying high school students should learn about topics related to gender identity or sexual orientation, compared with fewer than 3 in 10 saying the same for elementary school students.
The survey of Maryland voters comes weeks before they cast ballots in local and statewide races with candidates who have made this issue a part of their campaigns, including the governor’s race.
Dustin Burrell, a 33-year-old in Rockville who works in an automotive service department, said such discussions were more appropriate beginning around middle school, since that’s around the time children start to go through puberty. He recalled that as the time in his life when he and his friends started to become more aware of sexuality. “I think that would be a more appropriate time, once you start feeling more of those feelings,” he said.
Issues of sexuality and gender identity are not his top focus as a voter because he’s not a member of the LGBTQ community and the policies do not affect him as much, Burrell said. But he said he doesn’t want policies that would “isolate other people and their freedoms to express who they want to be.”
How educators teach about gender identity and sexuality has become a major part of the education and political culture wars, with the introduction and passage of new Republican-written laws in some states limiting those discussions. Many opposed to the discussions argue that these subjects are best left to parents. The challenges, along with restrictions on teaching about issues including race and history, have led some teachers to leave the profession.
Despite the pushback in some areas, resources and lesson plans are becoming much more common for educators who want to teach about gender identity. At least six states require that curriculums include LGBTQ topics, and the federal government recommends that schools include gender identity in their sex-education programs.
Nationally, Americans have become more accepting of gay and lesbian relationships over time. In a Gallup poll in May, 71 percent of Americans said gay or lesbian relations were “morally acceptable,” up from 40 percent who said the same in 2001.
In Maryland, an updated health framework was approved by the state board of education in 2019 that would introduce conversations about gender identity at an earlier age. Under the framework, prekindergarten students, for example, are taught to “recognize and respect that people express themselves in different ways.” It further advises school systems to teach kindergartners how to “recognize a range of ways people express their identity and gender.”
The framework, which the state’s school districts are required to implement, has been controversial among some parents, especially in Frederick County — where Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox lives. When the county’s school board adopted the framework, Cox accused the school board president online of “misleading children for potential chemical castration and sexualized grooming.”
Health-education researchers have said the framework is developmentally and age appropriate.
In the Post-UMD poll, 41 percent of Maryland voters say greater social acceptance of transgender people is “good for society,” while 17 percent say it is bad and 39 percent view it as neither good nor bad. A national Post-UMD poll in May found a similar 40 percent saying greater social acceptance of transgender people was good for society, 25 percent saying it was bad and 35 percent saying it was neither good nor bad.
More registered Democrats, younger voters, voters with college degrees and Marylanders from the D.C. suburbs say that greater social acceptance of transgender people is good for society than do other voters in the state.
Views on discussing LGBTQ acceptance in schools also vary sharply by political party, age and education level, with Democrats, younger adults and college graduates more likely to say discussing LGBTQ acceptance is appropriate. Still, fewer than half of voters in all of these groups say such discussions are appropriate in kindergarten through third grade, while about half of registered Democrats and voters under 40 say they are appropriate for grades 4-6.
Michael Lawson, 48, who lives in Eldersburg, said he thinks schools should teach students to respect others but are not the setting to teach about sexuality. Schools should focus on academic subjects and extracurriculars such as sports, he said.
He lauded action that the Carroll County school board took recently, which included implementing a “politically neutral policy” — requiring employees to “remain neutral on political issues, parties, and candidates during classroom instruction” and avoid discussing such issues unless they are aligned with curriculums — and prohibiting the display of most flags on school property in response to rainbow Pride flags some teachers displayed in their classrooms. Those actions were reassuring to him as a parent of a seventh-grader, he said.
“So many people have different sets of values, that to assign a particular set of values to people, I think it’s against what the schools should be focused on,” Lawson said.
Cox has made parental rights a defining issue during his time in the state legislature and has tried to make it center stage in the campaign. In a recent mailer to supporters, he falsely accuses Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wes Moore of pledging to “force transgender indoctrination of your children.”
Cox, a freshman delegate, has compared a bill on mental health access for 12-year-olds to the Nazis’ trampling of Jews’ rights during the Holocaust. He has sponsored a bill that would ban discussion of gender identity before the fourth grade and has unsuccessfully pushed for a bill to allow parents who disapprove of the curriculum being taught in history or sex-education classes to opt their children out of the instruction.
During a recent forum at Morgan State University, Cox offered his views on discussing gender identity in classrooms.
“This is universally concerning, because we are smart enough to love one another, to help students that are struggling with gender identity crises without brainwashing or indoctrinating the entire student body and forcing girls to have to compete in college with persons born as males,” he said.
Moore, who includes LGBTQ rights on his agenda, promises on his campaign website to “support students who identify as LGBTQ+ by fully implementing the newly passed Inclusive Schools Act, ensuring Maryland schools adopt LGBTQ+ affirming policies, create partnerships with organizations working with LGBTQ+ youth to provide additional resources needed to support our students, and broaden access to trauma-informed mental health care in schools.”
Mikeria Slack, 24, who lives in Greenbelt, said that she thinks that children notice early on different family makeups and relationships, and that schools should teach “how it’s not so different.” Slack, who is a lesbian, said that she first started noticing herself developing a crush on other girls when she was in the first grade, “but I didn’t know if that was okay or appropriate.”
“I didn’t really say anything. I grew up thinking that I had to have relationships with a boy; I didn’t want to be judged for not having that,” Slack said. “It definitely would have been helpful to just hear about it or know about it.”
The Washington Post-University of Maryland poll was conducted over telephone Sept. 22-27, 2022, among a sample of 810 registered voters in Maryland and has an error margin of plus or minus four percentage points; 79 percent of interviews were conducted over cellphone.
Ovetta Wiggins and Scott Clement contributed to this report.