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Lia Thomas has changed the world, though perhaps not in the way Thomas thinks. Over the past two years, Americans have undergone one of the more interesting and rapid public opinion shifts in recent history: a shift to the Right on the trans issue. New polling shows that far more Americans in 2023 believe there are only two possible sexes—male and female—than believed this in 2021. According to the "Politics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education," a new report released by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), between 2021 and 2023, the percentage of Americans who said that there are only two possible genders increased by over 10 percentage points, from 59 percent of Americans to 65 percent of Americans. Meanwhile, the percentage saying there are many gender identities fell to a low of 34 percent.
The trend to the Right on gender was especially marked among minorities. For Black Americans, the number of respondents who agree that male and female are the only possible options for us latter-day descendants of Lucy and/or Adam went from 65 to 70 percent, and for Latinos it rose from 56 to 66 percent.
Even the majority of millennials and Gen Zers now accept the gender binary, as do vast majorities of almost every major religious group. And two of the U.S.'s three major political blocs now express mass-majority support for the idea that there are only two possible human genders, with Republicans at 90 percent and Independents at 66 percent. Even Democratic voters come fairly close to evenly split, with 44 percent believing that gender is a binary.
And these response rates are almost certainly on the low side, coming as they do from survey items that ask confusing questions about "gender" and "gender identity" rather than plain biological sex itself. When I and others have posed blunter asks, for example, "Can someone be a woman and have a penis?" to non-scientific audiences on social and public media forums, even more respondents say "No."
So what produced the cultural shift to the Right when it comes to gender in a country that's been growing increasingly tolerant on a host of other issues?
The answer is simple: Normal people have gotten to observe firsthand the predictable downstream implications of left-wing gender ideology, which says that how you feel about your gender is equally important to your biological makeup.
These "downstream implications" may be most noticeable in the realm of competitive athletics. In 2022, Lia Thomas, a biological male with a fully intact penis who identifies as female won what is probably the most prestigious race at the U.S. Collegiate Women's Swimming Championships, taking home the equivalent of gold in the 500-yard freestyle. For good measure, Thomas finished fifth nationally in the finals for the 200 yard freestyle swim and eighth in the finals for the 100 yard free. The swimmer earned All-American status in all three events.
One of Thomas' competitors, Riley Gaines of the University of Kentucky, was upset enough by the entire sequence of events that she has since become an activist for the restriction of women's sporting competition to biological women. Gaines now speaks nationally to packed houses full of female athletes and their supporters.
In a recent split screen seen around the country, Gaines endured a mob attack on the far-left leaning campus of San Francisco State University—while Thomas was nominated for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Woman of the Year by the University of Pennsylvania.
This particular swimmer hardly stands astride the female podium alone. Last week, a biological male who identifies as transgender won one of the major U.S. women's bicycle races by more than five minutes. OutSports recently published a list of no fewer than 23 transgender athletic champions, almost all of them successful in the women's field.
Of course, there are much worse things than losing a race. Male rapists and other criminals have learned that if they identify as female, they will get sent to a female prison. That's how you end up with a situation like what happened in New Jersey last year, when a "female identified prisoner with a penis" was transferred out of the only women's prison in the state after impregnating two inmates.
As more and more everyday citizens see news reports about situations like that one and read dispatches from increasingly popular outlets like Reality's Last Stand, they seem to be coming to a rather logical conclusion. Of course, "trans people exist, in that gender dysphoria is very real and our country-(wo)men with it can usually live as they think fit.
But they are not in fact or in practice members of the opposite sex—or at least, this is what two-thirds of Americans and three quarters of Black Americans believe.
Wilfred Reilly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
