(LifeSiteNews) – Two-thirds of American registered voters oppose forcing female athletes to compete against biological males, according to poll results released Friday by The Center Square.
The survey of 2,500 voters (1,000 registered Republicans, 1,000 registered Democrats, and 500 independents) conducted by Noble Predictive Insights found 67% of respondents against “transgender women” competing against actual women or girls in sex-specific athletic programs, including 75% of men and 60% of women.
As expected, Republicans were overwhelmingly opposed to opposite-sex inclusion at 89%, with Democrats divided at 45% opposed, 36% supportive and 19% unsure.
“The group driving that support are very left-leaning Democrats,” said Noble Predictive founder and CEO Mike Noble. “It is pushed by Democrats on the left. Biden’s administration has really embraced it.”
The poll suggests that most Americans are firmly aligned with conservatives on the issue, and that emphasizing it would be politically effective with all beyond left-wing ideologues.
“This is a huge opportunity for Republicans this election to use it as [a] wedge issue,” Noble added. “They don’t have a lot of wedge issues. This is a good issue for Republicans.”
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
Despite long-held conventional wisdom among Republican establishmentarians that so-called “social issues” are politically unpopular, multiple polls have shown in recent years that the general public is not nearly as receptive to the latest fronts in LGBT activism as they have grown accustomed to same-sex “marriage.”