Confirmation Of What We Already Knew About Trans Sports Bans
Conservatives did not, in fact, come around to supporting rights for ladies.
I hope to live long enough to see major U.S. media outlets collectively laugh at the idea that the country's right wing could possibly care about any marginalized group, or anything beyond themselves.
Unless I become my doppelgänger, billionaire vampire Bryan Johnson, this probably won't happen. It is nice, however, to have my priors confirmed by actual numbers rather than a working knowledge of how conservatives deploy bad faith as a deceitful (and potent) tactic to get what they want (exclusion, discrimination, domination, the protection of capital at all costs, things of that nature).
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For years now, mainstream media outlets – following the lead of right-wing propaganda outlets – have granted the presumption of good faith to folks on the right who cry about transgender athletes in women's sports. They can't say what they really want to say – trans people do not actually exist and have no place in society and might be dangerous sexual deviants – without losing that presumption of good faith. So they had to go with the next best thing: Pretending to care about the sanctity of women's sports and Title IX, without which women's sports would not exist as they do today.
BFT readers might remember I wrote about the bad faith that pervades the trans athlete issue, with Caemeron Crain following up with an excellent analysis of how and why this approach has worked so well for the American right wing. Well, now we have some hard numbers that tell us we were right about those most hostile to women's rights are the ones crying the hardest about trans folks in women's sports.
Denny Carter
A recent survey of 1,000 adults in the US tells us everything we need to know about the actual intention of Americans most fired up about stopping transgender people from participating in sports.
From the survey:
If the motivation behind trans sports bans were genuinely about protecting women's athletics, you would expect Title IX supporters to be strongly in favor of those bans. Instead, 43% of Title IX supporters backed [trans] 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.
This bad faith approach doesn't exist only among rank-and-file conservatives who spend all their time thinking about the genitalia of student athletes. It goes all the way to the top of the country's revanchist movement: The president, in announcing various cruel executive orders meant to stop trans Americans from being part of American society, has said he simply does not want to "allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls."
This sort of statement, taken with the presumption of good faith, expresses real concern for women athletes in the US – their safety and well being and the legitimacy and viability of their sports. We know the president doesn't mean what he says here, just as we know he doesn't mean what he says in justifying the occupation of Washington, D.C. or the regime's various efforts to stop so-called election fraud. But he understands how the game is played and he knows he won't be called out for his bad faith. There is no downside to operating this way. There is no penalty for bad faith.
Sexism, the survey found, was a leading indicator of whether a respondent would be in favor of banning trans people from women's sports. The right's whole sordid game is given away here.
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.
There are, by the way, roughly ten trans women in the country who would like to participate in women's college sports. Millions of Americans, meanwhile, assume upwards of 20 percent of college athletes are transgender thanks to a nationwide media freakout on par with the Satanic Panic of the late 80s and early 90s. Dozens of state legislatures have now passed sweeping bans on trans participation in sports. The 2024 election may have hinged on the trans athlete panic.
This is an extraordinarily useful issue for the country's right wing and they know it. If they have to feign concern and cry a few crocodile tears for Title IX and the women's sports they openly mock and belittle on social media, so be it. Big media outlets should remember that they don't mean any of it, that they despise women's sports and long to end government funding and protection of those sports as part of the systemic rollback of basic rights won after hard-fought 20th century battles. A little truth serum and they would say it with conviction: They want women off the playing field and into the kitchen.
There is no faith worse than the faith animating the trans sports issue. We have the numbers to prove it.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
