For 22-year-old Alex Ann, conversations about transgender women are black and white.
“Trans women are women,” said Ann, who identifies as a nonbinary trans person.
And when it comes to trans women competing in female sports — an issue that the Trump administration has made part of its policy agenda since Inauguration Day — Ann said that trans women should have all the same rights as cisgender women.
“When you are talking about what a woman is, well now you’re talking about checking to see if you’re really a woman,” said Ann, a South Florida resident. “And the kind of violation that in and of itself poses” goes too far, Ann continued.
Ann represents the views of just over a third of Gen Z, or 36%, that trans women should be allowed to participate in female sports, according to the new NBC News Stay Tuned Poll, powered by SurveyMonkey. That level of support, from respondents ages 18-29, was the highest of any generation in the poll of 19,682 American adults.
Overall, 1 in 4 respondents, or 25%, said they supported trans women participating in female sports in a yes/no question. The other 75% of American adults said they do not believe trans women should be permitted to participate in female sports.
Cecilia Pogue, a 21-year-old college student from Virginia, said she believes that allowing trans women to compete in female sports comes at the expense of cisgender women.
“We want people to feel comfortable in their skin, and we want them to have opportunities, but we also need to make sure we’re not taking opportunities away from the majority to please the minority,” Pogue said.
Many Gen Zers who spoke with NBC News about the topic discussed the complexity and nuances around it, such as how going through male puberty or taking hormone suppressants could affect a trans woman’s physical development.
“A lot could be fixed by having a separate column for trans sports,” said Julian Miller, 22, from Texas. “Just like how we separate male and females, we should separate trans males and trans females to compete against each other. I know there might not be a lot of competition at first, but as the sport grows, so will the competition.”
The poll found a significant gender gap between young men and women on the issue. About 3 in 4 Gen Z men (72%) say transgender women should not be allowed to play female sports as compared to about half of young women (56%).
Advocates of trans women competing in female sports say that the marginal number of trans women competing at an elite level makes the topic a nonissue. In December, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified that he was aware of fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of more than 500,000 total NCAA college student-athletes, which would equal 0.002% of this college student-athlete population.
“This is really a distraction,” Ann said. “It matters, but it’s not what is most important right now.”
Jay Baca, a 26-year-old who identifies as nonbinary, noted that when trans men compete in men’s sports “nobody bats an eye about it.”
“It still comes down to patriarchy, sexism and transphobia,” the Colorado native said.
But despite the criticism and the relatively low numbers of people involved, it has undeniably become a hot-button political issue in recent years.
Critics of trans women in female sports say trans women have an unfair advantage past puberty due to their body composition. Differences in body mass, bone density and height that trans women may have, Pogue said, can create a “dangerous” environment.
“I don’t really want to play soccer against a 6-[foot]-2 person who already went through puberty and then changed late high school or in early college,” she said.
Vito Milino, 22, of California, said trans women should not compete in “full-contact or highly physical sports alongside cisgender women” but sees no problem in other sports.
San Jose State University’s women’s volleyball program became a flashpoint in the national conversation over trans women and women’s sports recently, as has swimming, a noncontact sport. In 2022, Lia Thomas made history when she became the first openly trans woman to win an NCAA championship while competing for the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team. Thomas had spent the first two years of her collegiate career on Penn’s men’s team.
The NCAA in February changed its rules following an executive order from President Donald Trump, with the collegiate athletics organization instituting a new policy that “limits competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only.”
Then, on Monday, the Trump administration said that Penn violated laws that guaranteed equal protections for women in sports by allowing a trans swimmer to compete on the school’s women’s team and into team facilities. The Education Department previously announced an investigation of San Jose State.
Still, some medical experts caution against misconceptions that fuel much of the dialogue around trans women in female sports.
“Trans women are people who want to participate in society as the gender they identify as being — women,” said Bradley Anawalt, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who rejects the notion that trans women are changing for athletic advantages.
“They are not undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy to attempt to have greater success in sports,” he said. “Gender-affirming therapy, hormone therapy is not easy. It requires doctor visits, blood tests and frequent doses of medications that might include shots.”
When it comes to body composition, he added, “The competitive advantage of elite male athletes starts with puberty when blood testosterone concentrations increase to adult male levels.”
Alithia Zamantakis, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing, sees the higher Gen Z poll numbers in support of trans women competing in female sports as compared with older demographics as an indicator of a shift in “society at large.”
“We can expect greater and greater support for transgender rights as the myths and anti-trans” rhetoric are demystified, she said.
Missing from the conversation is a “balancing of equities,” according to Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a Democratic-aligned Washington, D.C., think tank.
“Sports are fabulous ways to learn all kinds of values — teamwork, persistence and healthy habits,” she said. “And just saying that an entire class of people can’t participate in any sport at any level, it really goes against those values and is a real detriment to that group of people.”
“We also do need rules about participation in sports,” Erickson added.
“But I think those rules should be made based on fairness and safety, not based on animus towards a certain group of people,” she continued.
This NBC News Stay Tuned poll was powered by SurveyMonkey, the fast, intuitive feedback management platform where 20 million questions are answered daily. It was conducted online April 11-20 among a national sample of 19,682 adults ages 18 and over. Reported percentages exclude item nonresponse and round to the nearest percentage point. The estimated margin of error for this survey among all adults is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
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