Sixty-nine percent of all Americans and a plurality of Democrats believe that athletes should only be allowed to compete against peers who share their biological sex. Just 26% of the general population, meanwhile, believes that athletes should be allowed to compete against those who share their gender identity, according to Gallup.
Two years ago, that first figure was 62% and the second was 34%. That’s a substantial swing on top of an already significant margin.
That movement is consistent across the ideological spectrum, too. Republicans have moved 11 points away from supporting identity-based competition. Independents have moved 9 points. Democrats have moved a staggering 15 points away from the position advocated by most party officials, from a majority in favor of identity-based competition to a plurality in favor of sex-based competition.
And all of these changes have occurred in spite of relentless promotion of identity-based competition and ceaseless castigation of sex-based competition by the press. Across the United States, efforts to enforce to enforce the majority opinion are characterized not as common sense measures — or even the manifestation of a reasonable argument — but extreme and even hateful.
When the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a bill to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s athletics in April, the media cried foul with one voice.
A CNN article headlined “House passes anti-trans sports bill,” explained that it was part of “a larger effort of restrictive bills aimed at the LGBTQIA community.” The supposedly straight-laced Associated Press closed its write-up with a quote from the American Civil Liberties Union’s executive director, who wondered why Republicans in Congress were devoting energy to “bullying children?”
Responding to the broader effort to pass such bans in states across the country, Time asserted that transgender athletes have found themselves “in the crosshairs of America’s raging culture wars” and called such legislation “the first step in a larger assault on trans rights.” Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker was lambasted by the White House on MSNBC for “attacking transgender people” when he gave a platform to a college athlete who lost a medal her senior year while competing against a swimmer who had once swam for her school’s men’s team. CNN, rather ironically, knocked him for “not really reading the temperature in the country.”
In 2021, the Washington Post ran a story citing activists arguing that restrictions on transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports “would endanger transgender rights — and transgender lives.”
And after the World Athletics Council, the international governing body for track and field, decided to prohibit male-to-female transgender athletes from competing in women’s events, NPR insisted that it reached the decision “despite limited scientific evidence of physical advantage.” In another instance, the outlet has insisted that efforts to protect the integrity of women’s sports have “no basis in science.”
Similarly, when USA Swimming adjusted its rules to require transgender athletes to have a prolonged demonstration of low testosterone levels before competing in women’s events, an MSNBC op-ed deemed it the “latest charge” in a “crusade against trans athletes.”
Overwhelmingly, Americans believe that fairness demands that biological sex rather than gender identity should be the guidepost for competition. And overwhelmingly, the media casts attempts to enforce such a standard as ignorant and cruel.
On few other issues is the cloistered groupthink of the media so obvious. Scientific studies have shown that transgender athletes retain physical advantages even after years of cross-sex hormone treatments. Those who undergo male puberty enjoy differences in size, skeletal structure, and muscle function that cannot be undone.
Moreover, plain-to-see anthropological evidence makes these advantages obvious. Despite being small in number, transgender athletes have risen to the top in women’s swimming, weightlifting, and track and field.
In the face of this evidence, the press has little but invective to hurl at those who take notice.
But far from persuading or “educating” their opponents, its coverage is only driving Americans further away from its consensus position. The media’s unfounded pedantry and unfair framing have rightly been taken not as evidence of confidence in their arguments, but as an admission of their weakness.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
