Dr. Shatavia Wynn is a 2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellow focusing on LGBTQ rights and gender and an Assistant Professor of Africana and Religious Studies at Rhodes College.
The year 2027 will mark the 55th anniversary of the landmark Title IX passage, which outlawed sex-based discrimination and paved the way for women’s athletics in educational institutions. As this monumental anniversary approaches, Title IX has been weaponized against transgender athletes as an argument for upholding the gender binary in sports. No figure better illustrates this than Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer, who tied with Lia Thomas, a transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer, for fifth place at the 2022 NCAA championship. Gaines parlayed that moment into a career in far-right media and anti-transgender advocacy, traveling the country lobbying states to ban transgender women from sports and standing alongside President Donald Trump as he signed a 2025 executive order that would ban transgender athletes from women’s sports.
The political movement against transgender athletes does not end with sports. Gaines’ and others’ campaigns extend to banning “transgender medical treatments for adolescents, and ultimately the legal and cultural dismantling of the belief that transgender people exist.” This Spotlight Analysis examines the growing political and legal challenges surrounding transgender rights in the United States, including views toward transgender participation in sports and policies related to public restroom use.
The public nature of this conversation is reflected in the ways the news media covers the topic. PRRI’s 2021 data shows that Americans who most trust Fox News are about half as likely as Americans overall to support allowing transgender female students to participate in high school athletic events with cisgender female students or allowing transgender male students to participate with cisgender male students. Similarly, religion and race are also major influences on Americans’ views on this topic.
White evangelical Protestants are the least supportive of either male (26%) or female (8%) transgender athletes competing alongside cisgender athletes.
Beyond the president’s executive order, 27 states have passed laws banning transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, and two states have regulation or agency policies. Cases challenging such laws passed in West Virginia and Idaho have made their way to the Supreme Court. In both states, the law clearly states a desire to “protect” cisgender girls and women competing in school-sponsored sports.
States’ concerns expand beyond athletics. Bathrooms and locker rooms are also targeted. In 2016, North Carolina passed legislation stating that “people have to use the bathroom matching the sex on their birth certificate”. This concern is not limited to North Carolina or a particular region of the country, with more than 20 states now restricting access to bathrooms in some way.
As a 2026 PRRI report notes, “the majority of Americans (56%) favor laws that require transgender individuals to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex at birth.” Among white Christians, nearly eight in ten white evangelical Protestants (78%) support such laws, compared with 62% of white Catholics and 60% of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants. Among Christians of color, Hispanic Protestants (70%) are more likely than Black Protestants (60%) and Hispanic Catholics (59%) to support these laws. Jewish Americans (40%) and unaffiliated Americans (38%) are the least likely to favor these laws.
Similarly, when using PRRI’s Christian nationalism scale, we find that more than eight in ten Christian nationalism Adherents (83%) support laws requiring transgender people to use the bathrooms that correspond with their sex at birth, followed by 78% of Sympathizers and 60% of Skeptics. Just 26% of Christian nationalism Rejecters support these laws.
In hindsight, North Carolina’s 2016 legislation would open the door for the further spread of attacks against gender-affirming care and transgender athletes. The fight against transgender athletes becomes a public conversation through public pressure. Ideologies that define sports as binary transform public conversations over transgender athletes’ participation into debates that blur the distinctions between church and state, emboldening agitators such as Gaines to take their attacks public.
