In 2022, I suffered a traumatic brain injury from a spike by a biological male who was allowed to play on the opposing girls’ volleyball team. The force from the hit was unlike anything I’d experienced from female opponents, and the injuries I sustained ultimately ended my career. Three years later, I still battle headaches and cognitive issues.
You’d think that women, even more than men, would be aghast at this. After all, women are the ones who know intimately—from a young age at that—how vulnerable we are against men who are bigger and stronger than us and capable of overpowering us.
But according to a recent study, women are actually less likely than men to support policies that ban males from women’s sports. Per James Nuzzo on X and Substack, multiple polls from 2015 to 2025 in the U.S., UK, and Canada show that women consistently show higher support than men for allowing trans-identified males to compete in female categories.
In survey after survey—Gallup, YouGov, and others—women’s support for permitting men in women’s sports edges out men’s, even as overall approval for permitting men in women’s sports has declined sharply over time. It’s a pattern that defies intuition: the group most impacted by unfair competition, safety risks, and lost opportunities is the one more inclined to accommodate it.
How did we get here?
For the past decade and a half, the dominant narrative—from schools, mainstream media, social media, colleges, and basically every mainstream institution—has framed any concern about biological males in women’s spaces as “transphobic.” In many social circles, even questioning the concept of “gender identity” means you’re somehow invalidating someone’s existence. After all, good, compassionate women are supposed to support inclusion, right?
Of course, “inclusion” only applies to those who fall in line. Dissidents are not included in the slightest. Instead, we are called “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), bullies, and bigots, ostracized not only from friend groups but from mainstream society itself. Raising complaints about a man in the women’s bathroom at college can get you kicked out of your sorority, as I was, and challenging ideas about gender that were fringe positions not long ago can get you smeared and attacked online.
Add to that the guilt that too often accompanies the decision to buck the Left’s idea of empathy. Gender activists have convinced far too many that if we don’t affirm a man who claims to be a woman, if we don’t let him into our spaces, if we don’t risk being injured by him, he might withdraw into a depression, or worse, commit suicide—an unfortunately persistent myth promoted by activists.
Women are inherently wired to be communal and we are wired to be nurturers. We want to minimize conflict and maximize harmony and empathy. We don’t want to be shunned. But even more than that, we don’t want to hurt the vulnerable.
Now, it’s silly to say that a 6’0” man who wants to join women’s contact sports is somehow “vulnerable” while the women he is competing against are oppressors, but the topsy-turvy language of gender ideology, having infiltrated society, has convinced polite society that up is down and down is up.
When activists frame the choice as being between “protecting the transgender community” and “being bigots who hate those who look different,” it’s not shocking that women would default to the former.
Indeed, gender ideology weaponizes the best of women’s nature against our actual, sex-based interests. The problem is that while most women (and most Americans) have been inundated with gender ideology propaganda, they probably haven’t seen the injuries up close, or seen the numbers on how male puberty confers lasting advantages in strength, speed, and power that hormone suppression doesn’t fully erase. And that’s before the social worries, one of which is: that speaking up could hurt someone else’s feelings—or their own reputation. So many women nod along, suppress their instincts, and publicly affirm what feels like the “kind” position.
But there is no kindness in lying to ourselves or others, or in putting women like myself in vulnerable positions that get us injured by men who never should have been in our spaces.
Kindness, ultimately, can only be found in truth, and the truth is that men cannot become women, no matter how they identify. Women’s sports were fortified under Title IX precisely because sex-based differences matter for fair competition. To reject Title IX undermines the very equity we’ve fought for.
To my fellow women: you are not bad people for recognizing reality. You don’t have to choose between compassion and truth. When enough sane, courageous women say “no more lies,” the social coercion we have all been subjected to loses its power. Being kind to those who identify as transgender doesn’t require sacrificing women’s single-sex spaces.
