A new study from political science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that people who are more sexist are also more likely to support restrictions on trans girls and women participating in women’s sports.
The study examined the beliefs of 1000 American adults when it came to trans people in sports and sexism, a timely topic considering how politicians and public figures who support restrictions on trans people’s participation in sports generally frame their position as protecting women’s rights.
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The participants were asked whether they agreed with several statements about women – “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men,” “Women are too easily offended,” and “Women exaggerate problems they have at work” – which are used by social scientists to assess whether a person holds a sexist view of women as controlling and incompetent.
About 79% of the people who were found to be the most sexist agreed that the government should ban trans people from playing sports as their gender, while only 28% of the least sexist people agreed.
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They also asked people to rate how they feel about women on a scale of 0 to 100 and found that 45% of people with the most positive views of women supported sports bans, while 58% of people with the most negative views of women did the same.
Title IX, the federal law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex in schools, is often used by both supporters and opponents of trans sports bans as a justification for their respective positions. Supporters of such bans argue that trans girls are actually boys and that allowing them to play sports with other girls is effectively letting a boy take the spot of a girl on a team. Opponents argue that discriminating against certain girls because of the sex they were assigned at birth is the kind of discrimination that Title IX prohibits.
The researchers asked participants if they support Title IX. Only 43% of supporters of Title IX also supported trans sports bans, while 70% of people who said they oppose Title IX supported trans sports bans.
The researchers said their results were robust and held up even when they controlled for partisanship, ideology, and demographics.
“That does not mean that everyone who supports a ban is motivated by hostility toward women,” the authors wrote at The Conversation. “But the consistency of these findings makes it difficult to accept that protecting women is a primary reason why Americans support these restrictions.”
The study’s results come after a summer-long media discussion of trans sports bans after conservative WNBA player Sophie Cunningham said that she wants to “protect young girls” from “biological men.” (The opponents of trans rights often refer to trans minors with adult terms like “men” to make them seem scarier.)
The president, who was found liable in 2023 for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room, has also used the language of protecting women to justify his support for trans sports bans, writing in his February 5, 2025, executive order on the matter that he wants “to protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports.”
But when speaking extemporaneously on the topic this past summer, Trump has made numerous sexist jokes about women in sports, including mocking Cunningham to her face as a bad basketball player because she’s a woman and saying that Dennis Rodman, who is 65 and has been retired from basketball for nearly three decades, is better than any woman actively playing in the WNBA.
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