YouGov: 2-1 majority wants transgender athletes to compete in biological categories

AP Photo/John Bazemore

As is usual, this skips over the most common-sense solution to this nonsensical issue — and that’s precisely what the activists want. The latest YouGov poll demonstrates some sympathy for transgenders, but not to the point of ignoring the science and annihilating opportunities for women to compete in athletics. By a nearly 2:1 margin, Americans oppose allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports:

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A majority of adults say transgender athletes should compete in sports in accordance with their biological sex, a new Washington Examiner -YouGov poll has found.

The poll found that 53% of adults either somewhat or strongly opposed to including transgender athletes on sports teams based on their claimed gender identity.

The results revealed a substantial partisan gap on the issue, with 80% of Republicans indicating they opposed allowing athletes to compete based on gender identity, while only 34% of Democrats opposed, along with 51% of independents.

Lest anyone thinks that YouGov cooked the survey for the Washington Examiner …

Carl Bialik, YouGov’s vice president of data science and U.S. politics editor, told the Washington Examiner that the results were fairly consistent with previous polls on the issue.

Surprising this is not. It doesn’t seem out of range of common sense, and that’s usually a pretty good indicator of public opinion in the long run. Men and women are biologically different as a matter of science. It’s the very basis on which we have separate categories for men and women in athletic competition, from golf and tennis to swimming and field sports.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, however, this is not a controversy with only a binary choice. (SWIDT?) The alternate to allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports is to craft a third category of competition for transgenders. That would allow athletes to choose either to compete against athletes of the same biological sex, or to voluntarily compete in the transgender category. Women who want to compete as transgenders could then voluntarily choose to compete against biological males, rather than get forced into doing so and then socially shamed into remaining silent about the injustice of that imposition.

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The YouGov poll doesn’t ask that question, and neither does any other poll that I’ve seen, although I may have missed one at some point. That likely is in large part because the transgender-activist movement would oppose even the discussion of such an option. They want to impose their maximalist vision of science-free consideration of “gender” as a received truth rather than a point of debate. And women are the ultimate victims of this attempt to shove that ideology down the throats of Americans and then to silence any dissent as “hate speech.”

The fact that only 29% of Americans approve of this policy despite years of such haranguing shows just how fringe this movement is. The YouGov survey gives more such indications, too. While everyone seems pretty well versed in the arguments on transgender policy, very few people actually know a transgender personally:

Only 4% of the respondents of this survey identified as transgender. There is a real sense that we’re turning both science and society upside down for a very small slice of the populace — not for tolerance, not for acceptance, but for a kind of forced celebration of their status. Americans still aren’t buying it, not even with the social penalties that shrieking social activists seek to apply.

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If transgender athletes finding a place for competition is a real problem, why not talk about the real solution? We all know the answer to that … even while we get pressured to keep our mouths shut about it.

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