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WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) – A new study has polled female athletes from around the world who compete at the highest level of their respective sports on the issue of trans-identifying biological men competing in women’s sports leagues, with most saying they oppose the policy.
According to the study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, 77% of the world-class female athletes polled said it was unfair for biological men to compete in female sports categories, while 15% thought it was fair. The anonymous women polled included 26 World Champions, 22 Olympians, and 6 Paralympians and the US made up the biggest percentage of nationality, representing 33 percent, followed by Europe at 27% and Canada at 15%.
Sports were divided into three groups in the study including “heavily reliant on physical capacities” which are defined as events track and field activities, “contact sports” like wrestling, and “precision sports” like golf. According to the poll, 58 percent of respondents supported the classification of sex as biological and thought it was unfair for biological men to compete against women in all categories but precision sports. However, 94% of the respondents also said they supported individuals changing their sex for everyday life, and 81% said trans-identifying athletes needed to be treated more fairly in sports.
This survey comes only a matter of weeks after Gov. Tony Evers vetoed Assembly Bill 377, which would’ve created a rule that athletes competing in Wisconsin would need to compete in sports leagues based on their biological sex and had passed through both the state Senate and Assembly on party lines earlier this year and a month after the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) banned biological men from women’s sports as a whole.
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