Americans Strongly Oppose Including Men in Women’s Sports

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

 

It’s not just you:

 

Even as an increasing share of Americans report familiarity with and tolerance for transgender people, most oppose allowing transgender female athletes to compete against other women at the professional, college and high school level, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

 

What is “most”?

 

The poll, conducted May 4 through 17 among 1,503 people across the United States, finds 55 percent of Americans opposed to allowing transgender women and girls to compete with other women and girls in high school sports and 58 percent opposed to it for college and professional sports. About 3 in 10 Americans said transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete at each of those levels, while an additional 15 percent have no opinion.

 

The breakdowns are 49–33 against for “youth sports”; 55–30 against for “high school sports”; and 58–28 against for both “college sports” and “professional sports.”

 

The Post notes:

 

Despite being mostly opposed to their participation in sports, the Post-UMD poll finds Americans’ general attitudes toward transgender people to be more positive than negative.

 

But this shouldn’t be surprising at all. There is an enormous difference between asking for tolerance of your difference and making physical demands of other people on the back of it. If a 30-year-old man says he identifies as a five-year-old, a lot of Americans will say, “okay, whatever, free country.” If that man then demands to enter the five-year-old’s spelling bee, they’ll demur.

 

As Phil Klein has argued before in National Review, the “trans rights” movement has fundamentally misunderstood what happened with gay marriage, and why it simply cannot be applied to transgenderism:

 

While there are many reasons for the rapid shift in opinion on gay marriage, one strong component to it was that there was a libertarian thread at the heart of it. Proponents argued that if two men fell in love, decided they wanted to spend their life together, and wanted to make it official, it should be their own business and nobody else’s. Arguments made by social conservatives about the breakdown of traditional marriage did not prevail, especially with the younger generation, because people ultimately concluded that one couple’s same-sex marriage poses no threat to anybody else’s ability to have a happy heterosexual marriage. The libertarian argument is what helped win over a lot of small-government Republican and independent voters to the cause of gay marriage. In 2004, just 19 percent of Republicans supported gay marriage, according to Gallup, but by 2021, a 55-percent majority did.

 

What’s substantially different about the current debate on the transgender front is that it has moved away from the successful strategy of gay-marriage proponents. While the public is broadly accepting of the idea that adults who want to identify as a different gender and undergo hormone treatment to live out their lives should be given space to do so, transgender activists are pushing for changes that have direct ramifications for others. Two men falling in love and getting married may not directly affect anybody else, but when an athlete who has gone through male puberty starts to dominate a woman’s sport, it does.

 

This is spot on. And it’s not going to change any time soon.