Women’s sports finally mobilize transgender opposition

It took questions over the integrity of women’s sports to convince the public eye to zero in on transgender policy ahead of this Election Day .

An advertisement titled “Dear Nike” has reached high popularity on X. It is part of XX-XY Athletics’s efforts to promote women’s only sports and combat rules allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, a phenomenon most prominent at the collegiate level. The company is aligned with “ XX Day ,” also known as “Real Women’s Day,” which began this past Oct. 10. Whether or not XX Day catches on, for now, the ad certainly has:

In honor of #XXDay tomorrow, please join us in asking @Nike to do the right thing & stand up for girls, by sharing our new ad, "Dear Nike". pic.twitter.com/af8XeYPhTv

Perhaps the final straw that pushed XX-XY founder Jennifer Sey to address Nike directly was San Jose State’s controversy . The school allowed a biological male to play as part of its women’s volleyball team, resulting in several schools forfeiting instead of playing the team. San Jose’s volleyball co-captain Brooke Slusser joined a lawsuit against current NCAA policy as well.

Whatever the catalyst, XX-XY’s ad is well timed and well made. Which makes sense for a company with Sey as its CEO: She was a successful chief marketing officer for many years beforehand. The ad is clean, simple, pointed, and persuasive.

But public support for XX-XY’s “Dear Nike” ad is not just due to good marketing. Viewers already feel unrest surrounding transgender policy, and to see that there is money and notoriety behind the movement motivates their support.

Surveys from 2022 show public resistance to transgender policies, mostly at gaps of about 10 to 15 percentage points. Even then, 58% of Americans were in favor of requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams in accord with their biological sex. States overall have always been divided on questions such as transgender bathroom use, but the majority have grown more and more in favor of restrictive policy.

More recently, surveys in Texas, Arizona, and California have all found considerable favor for policies that regulate transgender access to bathrooms, medical procedures for minors, and women’s sports. Texas and Arizona saw predictably large point gaps between groups for and against restrictive transgender policy, while California saw smaller gaps. The largest point gap came out of Texas, with 68% in favor of banning biological males from women’s sports and only 16% against the motion.

Add to those findings people’s increasingly negative views of transgenderism. Up from 51% in 2021, 55% of people in 2023 say it is “morally wrong to change one’s gender.” Likewise, 69% say that all people should be allowed “only on teams that match their birth gender," while the share was 62% in 2021.

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People seem always to have been more in opposition to transgender “rights” on the sports front than any other, but it is still significant that women’s sports are the issue to push these opinions out into the open. There is something inherently unfair about men parading as women and walking straight into their sports — not to mention something intuitively false about the notion that one can actually alter the deep realities associated with biological sex.

The cause for women’s sports, as taken up by XX-XY Athletics, clearly is not one exclusive to die-hard conservatives. It is the perfect opportunity to depict transgenderism as ludicrous as it truly is, through an area that is very practical and very “equality”-based. Maybe it is a little sad that it took an issue as obvious as men in women’s sports to shake the public into thinking harder about transgender policy, but that is just the reality of modern politics. At this point, it could be more politically influential than Democrats realize.