A new survey of 1,000 American adults found that the strongest supporters of transgender sports bans are not the people who admire women most: they are the people who hold the most hostile views about women. Among the most sexist respondents, 79% supported bans. Among the least sexist, 28% did. That gap is not subtle, and it is not easy to explain away.

What the research actually found

Political scientists studying public opinion on trans rights asked a straightforward question: if support for transgender sports bans is really driven by admiration for female athletes, then the people who feel most warmly toward women should be the most likely to support those bans. So do they?

They do not. Among respondents with the most positive views of women, 45% supported restricting trans participation. Among those with the most negative views, 58% did. A difference, certainly, but what really separates the groups is the sexism measure. Researchers asked whether respondents agreed that women seek control over men, that women are too easily offended, and that women exaggerate problems they face at work. These are well-established measures of hostile sexism, and the results are striking: support for bans climbs from 28% among the least sexist to 79% among the most sexist. That is not a marginal finding. That is a pattern.

The Title IX data makes it sharper still. Title IX is the law that requires schools receiving federal funding to give girls and women equal opportunities in sport. If the motivation behind trans sports bans were genuinely about protecting women's athletics, you would expect Title IX supporters to be strongly in favour of those bans. Instead, 43% of Title IX supporters backed restrictions, compared with 70% of those who oppose Title IX. The people most hostile to the law that actually protects women in sport are the people most enthusiastic about laws framed in women's name.

The language of protection

I want to stay with that framing for a moment, because it matters. Sophie Cunningham, the WNBA star, told ESPN in July 2026 that she wanted to protect young girls in locker rooms and in sport. That is a sincere-sounding concern and she is, by any measure, someone who has invested her life in women's athletics. I am not in a position to question her motivations, and I am not trying to.

But the political apparatus surrounding this issue is a different thing. When Trump signed his executive order prohibiting transgender women and girls from competing in federally funded schools, he said: "We will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls." That is not the language of someone who holds women in high regard, but the language of someone who sees women as passive, as victims who need saving, as a category to be managed rather than people with their own agency. And the survey data suggests that this is exactly the population most energised by these bans.

None of that means every individual who supports a ban is acting from hostility toward women. The researchers are clear about that. But the pattern is consistent enough that "protecting women" cannot function as the primary explanation. The numbers simply do not support it.

Who is actually being protected here?

This is the question the data forces us to ask. Because if the people driving these bans are disproportionately those who oppose Title IX, who hold hostile stereotypes about women, and who feel coldest toward women as a group, then the protection being offered is not for women. Something else is happening.

What we know about transgender athletes is this: relatively few compete at high school or collegiate level. The feared domination of women's sport by transgender women has not materialised in any documented, systematic way. The scientific picture on competitive advantage is genuinely complex, varies by sport, and changes with the length and nature of hormone therapy. This is not a debate where one side has all the facts and the other is in denial. It is a debate where a real and complicated question is being used to do something much simpler: remove transgender women from public life.

Twenty-seven states have passed laws since 2020. A presidential executive order now extends that reach across federally funded education. The scale of the legislative effort is wildly disproportionate to the number of transgender athletes it affects. That disproportion is itself a kind of data.

What women actually think

I hear from women all the time who are uncomfortable with the way their concern has been borrowed and amplified in this debate. Women who competed in sport for years, who care deeply about equity in athletics, who also think that transgender women are women and deserve to be treated accordingly. Their voices tend not to appear in the policy conversation, because they are not useful to the argument being made in their name.

The survey reminds us that "women" is not a monolith, and that the most vocal advocates for women's sport in this particular debate are, on the available evidence, not the group with the strongest record of supporting women. That is worth saying plainly, and the data now allows us to say it with some confidence.

Transgender women are women. They are not a threat to women's sport. They are, in many cases, women who love sport, who trained for years, who wanted to compete, and who are now being told by law that they do not belong. The evidence that this protects anyone is thin. The evidence that it harms real people is not.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.