73% of Americans See Through the Transgender Sports Shell Game, and the Establishment Can’t Stand It
Seventy-three percent. That’s not a slim majority. That’s not a divided nation. That’s three out of four Americans looking at the question of biological males competing in women’s sports and saying no. Pew Research just confirmed it again, and the numbers haven’t budged. But watch how the experts frame it.
Pew’s own writeup bends over backward to remind you that a majority of Americans also support anti-discrimination protections for trans people in jobs and housing. Fifty-six percent, they note, favor those policies. Here’s the thing: nobody’s arguing about jobs and housing. Nobody’s saying trans people can’t work or rent an apartment. That’s a completely different question. But the establishment media trots it out every single time to muddy the waters, to make you think the person who objects to a 6-foot-2 sprinter demolishing the girls’ 400-meter is somehow the same person who wants to deny someone a lease. Ask yourself who benefits from that conflation.
Tom Asito / PexelsThe Supreme Court ruled in June that states can restrict transgender women and girls from women’s sports. Good. The Siena Research Institute followed up in April with its own numbers: majorities oppose trans athletes competing with those who share their gender identity at every level, high school through pro. Opposition has narrowed slightly, which the usual suspects will trumpet as progress. But even Siena’s own polling coordinator, Tess Zuchowski, admitted something the establishment never volunteers: when you give people a “don’t know” option, a chunk of them grab it. Twenty percent. That’s not genuine uncertainty. That’s people who know exactly what they think but have learned that saying it out loud gets you labeled a bigot by some HR department or campus commissar.
Here’s the number the experts really don’t want you to sit with: 55% of Democrats are uncomfortable with transgender athletes on teams that don’t match their birth sex. Not Republicans. Democrats. The party whose leadership has made this a sacrament can’t even get its own base to buy in. Among conservative and moderate Democrats, it’s 68% uncomfortable. The only subgroup where comfort wins is self-identified liberals, and even there, 38% are still uncomfortable. The Democratic Party is selling a product its own customers don’t want, and the sales pitch is getting more aggressive every year.
And the trend the establishment buries? Support for laws requiring athletes to compete on teams matching their sex at birth has grown among both Republicans and Democrats since 2022. The number is moving the wrong direction for the people pushing this. Republican support went from 85% to 88%. Democratic support went from 37% to 45%. Both climbing. The more Americans see this play out in real life, the less they like it.
颐园居 (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsFunny how that works. You let people watch it happen, and they figure it out on their own. No expert required.
The Siena poll even asked about Trump’s executive order threatening to pull federal funds from institutions that let transgender women compete in women’s sports. Forty-seven percent said it’s good for sports. Thirty-four percent said it’s bad. The rest said they don’t know, which is the polite American way of saying they’re not ready to be canceled yet.
The establishment line has been the same for years: this is a fringe concern, it affects almost nobody, and anyone who cares is a reactionary. Seventy-three percent is not fringe. Sixty-six percent favoring a law is not fringe. When three-quarters of the country agrees on something and the entire expert class, the media, the academic establishment, and corporate America line up on the other side, you don’t have a messaging problem. You have an honesty problem. And the people who have it aren’t the ones answering the survey.