Just in time for Thanksgiving the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication has released a new study to support your holiday table debates.

The National survey on rights, protections for transgender people has found that 71% of people favor protection of transgender individuals in schools and 70% favor such protections in the workplace. Sixty-two percent of the public supports allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military.

As one might expect, the public is more divided on the restroom issue. For some reason the creators of the survey asked whether public buildings should be required to have gender neutral restrooms. This was favored by 51%-43%.

I do not believe that this is not a tactic that would be favored by most transgender people. The majority of us wish to use the restroom of the gender with which we identify, not be pushed off into some third alternative, nor do we believe that all restrooms should be gender neutral. Transgender women do not wish to share restroom facilities with men any more than cisgender women do.

The split on this issue has played out across the nation in recent weeks. Last week, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance was repealed thanks in large part to a campaign by a Christian advocacy group that focused on the threat of “men in women’s bathrooms.” And, in Wisconsin, Republicans pushed to prohibit transgender public school students from using a bathroom or locker room assigned to the gender with which they identified.

Compared to Republicans, Democrats are more favorable toward transgender rights – a divide that the 2016 political campaign could highlight.

--Paul Brewer, director of the Center

The sharpest political divisions emerged on the issues of requiring gender neutral restrooms and transgender people serving in the military. Nearly three out of four Democrats surveyed (74 percent) said transgender people should be able to serve in the military, while only 43 percent of Republicans supported that idea. Meanwhile, Democrats backed the idea of requiring gender-neutral bathrooms in public places by a two-to-one margin over Republicans (66 percent - 34 percent).

CPC also found the expected generation gap. Respondents between 18 and 34 support protecting transgender students at a rate of 83%, while 77% favor protection in the workplace and 72% favor transgender people in the military. Fifty-nine percent of this cohort favor the requirement of gender neutral restrooms.

Meanwhile only 60% of people 55 and older favor protecting transgender students from discrimination and 56% favor workplace protections. Only 43% of this cohort favor requiring gender-neutral restrooms.

According to the study, women support transgender protections more than men, which is no surprise. Four of the 901 participants self-identified as transgender.

The data were collected from Nov. 11-17, 2015. Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ± 3 percentage points.